Post Office Work Room

Post Office Work Room shows the next stop in the mail's journey, after its departure from the suburban station in the mural on the left, toward its final destination. To produce the mural, Crimi spent time in the New York General Post Office Building, now the James A. Farley Post Office Building, sketching equipment and postal employees. The result is an accurate and thoughtfully composed rendering of the multifarious activities of an urban post office. The design is anchored by the strong horizontal and perpendicular lines of the furniture and machinery, including a mail chute on the left and a conveyor belt in the background. Amid this equipment, men perform their tasks: in the right foreground, three men handle incoming mail bags; behind them, five men sort letters on the conveyor belt, organizing them by size before sending them to the stamping machine; on the far left, a man receives and sorts parcels sliding down the chute; and in the left foreground, two men send out mail via pneumatic tubes. The array of activity highlights the modern advances of the Post Office while capturing the human element of cooperation and attention to detail.

Both Transportation of the Mail and Post Office Work Room portray an element of danger still inherent in the moving of mail, even long after the days of stagecoaches and the Pony Express. After World War I and throughout the 1930s, the country saw an increase in mail robberies by armed gangs. Thus, in 1921, approximately 50,000 surplus military firearms were distributed to railway postal clerks. Crimi also noticed as he observed employees at the New York City Post Office that some of them carried firearms. Therefore, one man in each mural is shown wearing a revolver holster: the man in the front right corner of Transportation of the Mail and the man leaning on the baggage cart in Post Office Work Room.