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Historic Warren post office murals portray a bygone way of life
By SARAH LEHR
WARREN
Visitors can walk into the Warren post office and observe a bygone way of life, thanks to a New Deal arts program.
Two oil-on-canvas murals, “Romance of Steel, Old” and “Romance of Steel, Modern,” created by Glenn Shaw in 1938, grace the post office’s walls and depict decades-old iron- and steelmaking techniques.
During the Great Depression, the federal government established the Section of Painting and Sculpture. The Section, a division of the Treasury Department, sought to ease the burden of the Depression by employing artists who would raise America’s spirits with public art.
Specifically, the Section hired artists to create murals for roughly 1,150 post offices across the United States.
Thomas Leary, an associate professor of history at Youngstown State University, specializes in the history of industry and workplaces and says the Warren murals have a “then and now” quality. “Romance of Steel, Modern,” Leary said, depicts steel-making techniques that were roughly contemporary to the mural’s creation in 1938. The other mural – “Romance of Steel, Old” – portrays iron-puddling methods that likely were obsolete by Shaw’s time.
“To take the trouble to go back into that period and become familiar enough with those older processes, to be able to depict them the way he did, took quite an investment on [Shaw’s] part,” Leary said. “It made me wonder where he got that information.”
The Section intended post-office murals to be a source of pride for American towns and encouraged artists to gain local knowledge by visiting the communities that would receive murals.
Louis Zona, emeritus professor of art history at YSU and director at the Butler Institute of American Art, said that before the New Deal, American artists saw themselves as “second fiddle” to European artists. New Deal art projects such as those commissioned under the Works Progress Administration changed that perception by investing in distinctly American art.
“What that WPA program did was to catapult New York as an international center of the art world, displacing Paris,” Zona said.
The federal government now considers post-office murals to be part of the historical record. In fact, the U.S. Post Office employs a preservationist specifically dedicated to protecting post-office art.
The decline of snail mail, however, has led to the closure of hundreds of U.S. post offices – which may spell trouble for post-office murals.
In 2011, for instance, movie producer Joel Silver bought the Venice Post Office in Los Angeles for $7 million and thereby gained ownership of the building’s mural, which Edward Biberman created in 1941. Silver converted the former post office to his headquarters and agreed to keep the mural intact and accessible to the public.
When post offices sell their murals, the U.S. Postal Service works to ensure that the buyer will fulfill the Section’s original mission of art for the people by keeping the art on public display for at least six days a week.
Youngstown Postmaster Thomas Kerns, who served as Warren’s postmaster for 10 years until 2012, is adamant that the Warren post office is not in danger of closing or of selling its murals. “That would never happen,” Kerns said.
The Warren murals, though slightly faded, remain in relatively good condition. Efforts to put out a 2009 rooftop fire caused water damage to the building, but mercifully spared the murals, according to Kerns.
Kerns, who called the Warren murals a “local treasure,” sometimes misses working in such a distinctive post office. “It’s not like the cookie-cutter buildings that are built today,” he said.