Window restorations underway at historic Mon City post office
Duane J. Gallo, postmaster at the Monongahela Post Office, gives Ringgold Middle School gifted students and their teacher, Krista Klorczyk, a tour of the historic building’s lobby last week.
The Monongahela post office at Fourth and Chess streets
Shown is a statue named “The Hiker” when it was dedicated before a new Monongahela Post Office was constructed behind it in 1915.
MONONGAHELA – A steel ladder in the Monongahela postmaster’s private restroom leads to an enclosed catwalk where postal inspectors would spy on employees while they sorted mail in the city’s historic post office.
The “spy room” floor was tiled with cork to prevent anyone from hearing footsteps and its walls were painted black to eliminate shadows as no one knew whether or not the inspector was in the building, said Terry Necciai, a Monongahela historian and architect.
“There could be someone up there right now,” Monongahela Postmaster Duane J. Gallo said last week when work began to restore the building’s 35 large original windows.
“The postal service is going the extra mile,” Gallo said while workers in a crane grounded away caulking that sealed the windows to their frames.
The windows will be removed, three or four at a time, and taken to a place where they will restored and given fresh coats of paint, he said.
The post office was built at 312 Chess St. in 1915 in the Colonial/Classical Revival style, and no expense was spared in its construction.
“Everything was done here on a big scale,” Gallo said last Tuesday while he led a small group of Ringgold Middle School students and their teacher on a tour of the two-story brick building.
The students were working on an assignment to select a historic building in the Mon Valley and create a new use for the structure. They selected a smaller post office in nearby Donora and redesigned it as a sports bar, said their teacher, Krista Klorczyk.
“They put a basketball court on the roof,” she said.
This post office was unusual in that its main lobby was situated on the second floor, reached by a white marble stairway with a bentwood handrail.
The doors are seven feet tall in the post office and the mailboxes were made of solid brass.
The entrance also is graced with a bronze statue of soldier named “The Hiker” that arrived before the post office was built. It honors veterans who served in the Spanish-American War, Philippine Insurrection and Campaign in China between 1898 and 1902.
The spy room was needed in the post office’s early days because many immigrant families who lived in the city at the time sent a lot of money to their relatives in Europe and other parts of the world, Necciai said.
There was once so much of value in the building that one of its safes, located in the postmaster’s office, was designed to hold gas canisters that would explode if it was broken into to overcome the thieves, Gallo said.