original 1921 complete "old main" chicago post office cast iron office door handles and matching plates with bower-barff finish

the old chicago main post office is a nine-story-tall building in downtown chicago. the original building was designed by graham, anderson, probst & white and built in 1921, but the structure was expanded greatly in 1932 in order to serve chicago's great volume of postal business, swollen by the mail-order businesses of montgomery ward (the largest retailer in the united states) and of sears (its competitor). the original 1922 structure was a brick-sided mail terminal building, sited just east of the main building that spans the eisenhower expressway as it turns into ida b. wells drive. major expansion in 1932 added a total of nine floors for more than 60 acres of floorspace. its footprint, as initially designed, would have blocked the proposed congress parkway extension; as a compromise, a hole for the parkway was reserved in the base of the post office and utilized twenty years later. competitors montgomery ward and sears combined to make chicago "the nation's mail-order capital". (montgomery ward, which became the largest retailer in the united states in the late 1930s, was eventually passed by sears, and then was purchased and merged.) in 1966 the main chicago post office came to a halt when a logjam of 10 million pieces of mail clogged the system for nearly a week. with chicago rated worst in postal deliveries, a new main post office to be located right across harrison street was proposed. in 1997, the old building was vacated in favor of the new, modernized facility. the building was listed on the national register of historic places in 2001.