Historic Post Office Building 1938–39

May 29

Beginning in 1921, the year Lincoln Park incorporated, efforts were underway to acquire a branch post office of the Detroit Post Office for the new village. It took several years before a store front location was opened at 1471 Fort Street to accommodate the increasing population of the fast-growing village. Prior to this, mail was delivered out of the Wyandotte Post Office (for south village residents) or Dearborn Post Office (north residents).

In the 1930s during the Great Depression, when the government was putting people back to work in public works programs, a more serious effort was initiated to build a new post office for the city. The U.S. Treasury approved acquisition of property owned by the Quandt and Goodell families for generations at the cross roads of State Street (Southfield Road) and Fort Park. The undeveloped lot - unofficially named *Quandt Park* - had been used for decades as a gathering spot and sports field where baseball and horseshoes were played. Herman and Mary O. (Goodell) Quandt sold the property in January of 1938 to the Treasury Department for $15,000. Plans on the building continued, with the city preferring to remain as a branch of the Detroit post office in order to retain advantages of the larger facilities of the Detroit office and to stay within the two-cent letter zone. Louis A Simon, who served as Supervising Architect for the Public Works Branch of the Treasury, was the architect of the post office building as he was for the majority of similar structures built across the country in the 1930s.

Construction began in December 1938 and the new $80,000 post office was officially dedicated in a public ceremony on Friday August 4th, preceded by a parade along Fort Street from the old branch post office to the new building which attracted thousands of local residents. A dedication banquet was held at 7:00 p.m. that evening at Calvary Lutheran Church. Three days later, on Monday August 7th, the post office opened its doors to the public. James V. Southers was postal superintendent at the time.

In the fall of 1991, the Lincoln Park Post Office moved to its current quarters at 1515 Fort Street, near the site of the original 1920s store front.

In 2004, the Lincoln Park Post Office building, now 65 years old and the home of the Lincoln Park Historical Museum, was placed on the National Register of Historic Sites through the efforts of the Lincoln Park Preservation Alliance.

The Post Office building was placed on the State of Michigan’s Historical Sites Register in 2007: Site No. L2156.

“Quandt Park” an undeveloped lot owned by Herman and Mary Quandt and future site of the post office building, Fort Park and Southfield Road, mid-1930s [photo taken from the roof of city hall]

The new Lincoln Park branch of the Detroit Post Office [1939 photo by Morris Sager Studio, Lincoln Park]

The employees of the Lincoln Park post office on the steps of the new post office; postal superintendent James V. Southers stands front row center [1939 photo by Morris Sager Studio, Lincoln Park]