In a message dated 12/10/98 11:26:29 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

> >> What will probably be lost (converted to the new waiting area for the
>  train
>  >station) is the > workroom, which the public never got to see.
>  >
>  >Michael:  Tell us about why you think such a giant "back office" building
>  was
>  >built in that place to begin with.  Were the Feds in on the deal with the
>  >Pennsylvania RR (which probably wanted the mail contracts)?  Was the
>  original
>  >Post Office designed for/intended for a much taller building on top, or
>  other
>  >uses?   Is the "workroom" anything special?

My Dad used to be postmaster in a small town (pop. 28,000) in the 1950s -
1960s, before "Mr. Zip" and automation came on the scene.  There was no
competition from email, FedEx or UPS, so the mails were the about only thing
to get stuff from one place to the other. Each post office sorted all the mail
that came through and everything had to be sorted by hand. The workroom was
honeycombed with sorting stations, each one with a huge bank of pigeon holes
-- one (it seemed) for every town in the entire world.

There were two things I remember about the workroom -- first is the memory of
my Dad standing in the middle of the workroom in front of a 10 ft high pile of
Christmas rush parcels that needed to be sorted and sent on that day. The pile
took up about 400 square feet of floorspace in this medium-sized PO!
Christmas rush always drove Dad crazy.

The second thing I remember was the secret place around the top of the
workroom where the postal inspectors hid and watched for theft and other bad
stuff through little viewing slots.  I've since found out that this hiding
place was standard construction in all post offices. Dad loved the cloak-and-
dagger of spiriting the inspectors into their hiding places at 4 in the
morning. I guess video cameras put these guys out of work! Come to think of
it, I didn't see any bathrooms up there ...

Now the POs just bag the outgoing mail and send all but the local mail on to
the regional mail centers. No need for large sorting floors, no little hiding
places for spies. Oh well... at least they can go to the john now.

Mary (loved going through the stuff in the dead letter office) Krugman