By the mid 1950s, the volume of mail handled in Post Offices around the country was beginning to overwhelm the outdated and antiquated systems then in use. Providence was selected as the site for a completely mechanized and modernized Post Office that would improve service, significantly speed up delivery and provide better working conditions for postal workers. In 1958, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield ordered construction of the First Fully Automated Post Office at Providence, Rhode Island in the West River Development Area.
The contract for the new Post Office was given to Intelex Systems, a subsidiary of ITT, on January 20, 1959 and the ground breaking ceremonies took place on April 2nd. Engineering issues faced by Intelex included methodology for mechanically culling and assembling each kind and class of mail quickly and efficiently; facing, sorting and canceling each class of mail by priority; and methods for getting this mail through all of the various processing functions and quickly dispatching it to its many destinations.
The Turnkey Providence Post Office was designed with the latest electronic and mechanical devices of the time to automatically move more than a million pieces of mail daily with a speed and efficiency never before achieved. A twenty-five foot high Control Tower was constructed to serve as the nerve center of the new building. The Post Office had six culling machines, six positioning and canceling machines, eleven letter sorting machines, two parcel post sorting machines and over 15,700 feet of conveyer belts.
On October 20, 1960 the United States Postal Service under Postmaster General Summerfield issued a commemorative stamp to publicize the opening of the first fully automated post office in the United States at Providence, Rhode Island.
–Providence’s Recent Past (2010), a PPS map by Ned Connors.
This is really a remarkable building for Providence, utterly unlike anything else here. This was the country’s first fully automated postal-sorting system, designed by Vanderweil Engineers (Boston). Maguire and Associates’ architectural response, especially the complex parabolic roof structure, shows a desire for the building’s design to reflect externally as well as to accommodate internally the innovative activity. There’s more than a hint here of Eero Saarinen’s Trans World Airlines Terminal (1956-62) at Kennedy (then Idlewild) Airport in New York. TWA’s lusciously organic massing is nowhere in evidence, of course, and the swooping roof forms are imposed on a regularized grid plan. Moreover, Saarinen’s use of extensive glazing is replaced here with blank walls and, on the façade, ribbon windows. It’s almost as though this were the love child of Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe. While too big to be considered delightfully quirky, it is an interesting, unusual, and highly visible landmark that should be better appreciated than it is.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
Last edited March 26, Elisabeth Brown
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