Miami Beach Post Office (1937), Miami Beach, Florida
Designed by Howard Lovewell Cheney and built under the Works Progress Administration in 1937, the Miami Beach Post Office on Washington Avenue is one of the finest examples of Art Moderne civic architecture in the South — its circular rotunda, cone-shaped roof, and cupola enclosing a lobby lit by a glass-block wall and enriched by three WPA murals painted by Charles Hardman in 1940.
At a glance
The Miami Beach Post Office stands at the corner of Washington Avenue and 13th Street in Miami Beach, Florida, in the heart of the city’s Art Deco district. Designed by Federal architect Howard Lovewell Cheney under the WPA patronage program and completed in 1937, the building departs from the standard Art Deco federal block-form in favor of a circular plan: a rotunda with a smooth-surfaced cone roof and a slender cupola, the circular form expressing on the exterior the gathering lobby within. Its stonemasonry eagle above the entrance, double doors surmounted by a ten-foot wall of glass blocks, and WPA murals by Charles Hardman give it a richness of program unusual in a post office of any era.
Key facts
- Built: 1937
- Style: Art Moderne (WPA Federal architecture)
- Architect: Howard Lovewell Cheney (Federal architect)
- Patron: Works Progress Administration (WPA)
- Mural artist: Charles Hardman, commissioned 1940 by the Section of Fine Arts (WPA)
- Mural subjects: Discovery (Ponce de León, 1513), de Soto and the Indians (1539), Conference (Thomas Jesup, 1837)
- Address: Washington Avenue at 13th Street, Miami Beach, Florida
- GPS: 25.78444, −80.13250
History
The Miami Beach Post Office was built under the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal’s largest relief program, which from 1935 to 1943 employed millions of Americans in public works projects and commissioned a companion program of murals, sculptures, and architectural ornament for new federal buildings. The Section of Fine Arts — a separate New Deal program — awarded mural commissions to artists through a competition process; for Miami Beach, the commission went to Charles Hardman, a native Floridian, in 1940, three years after the building opened.
Howard Lovewell Cheney, the architect, was a federal architect who designed several post offices in the WPA period with an emphasis on Streamline Moderne and Art Moderne forms — the smooth-surfaced, aerodynamic aesthetic that distinguished 1930s modernism from both the earlier Art Deco and the later International Style. His choice of a circular rotunda plan for Miami Beach was unusual; most federal post offices of the period followed a rectangular block, and the conical roof above the rotunda gives the building a profile unlike any other in the Art Deco district. The glass-block wall above the main entrance — ten feet tall, set to flood the lobby with diffused natural light — is one of the most effective applications of this WPA-era material in South Florida.
Hardman’s three-panel mural, installed in 1940, lines the lobby wall with episodes from Florida’s colonial history: Ponce de León’s arrival in 1513, Hernando de Soto’s military campaign of 1539, and General Thomas Jesup’s treaty negotiations with Native Americans after the Second Seminole War in 1837. The gilded post office boxes visible below the murals are original to the building’s 1937 installation, as is the small round fountain beneath the cupola.
What you see
The Miami Beach Post Office’s exterior reads as a cylinder capped by a smooth cone and topped by a slender cupola — a composition without direct precedent in American civic architecture. The circular form is legible from a distance because the cone roof projects above the surrounding commercial buildings of the Art Deco district. At the entrance, the double doors are topped by a ten-foot-tall wall of glass blocks — a material widely used in WPA-era civic buildings for its combination of transparency and structural solidity — and above the door a carved stone eagle of considerable size dominates the entrance bay.
Inside the rotunda, the glass-block wall illuminates the lobby with a diffused light that enters from above and suffuses the circular room. On the lobby wall, Hardman’s three mural panels run at eye level; below them, the gilded post office boxes of 1937 line the wall in long banks. The small fountain at the center of the floor is lit from above by the cupola. The effect is one of the most coherent WPA interior programs in Florida: a complete ensemble of architecture, art, and built-in fixtures that has survived intact and without significant alteration.
Practical information
- Active United States Post Office; the lobby and murals are visible during post office operating hours (weekdays and Saturday mornings).
- Admission is free; no special permit is required to view the WPA murals.
- Located in the Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District, walkable from Lincoln Road and the main Art Deco strip on Ocean Drive.
Getting there
The Miami Beach Post Office is on Washington Avenue at 13th Street in Miami Beach’s South Beach neighborhood. Miami International Airport (MIA) is approximately 8 miles west. The Miami Beach SunBus connects South Beach to the Metrorail and Metrobus network; the Art Deco Welcome Center on Ocean Drive is 2 blocks east. By car, the MacArthur Causeway (US-41) connects downtown Miami to South Beach; Washington Avenue is easily accessible from Alton Road and other parallel north-south streets.
Nearby
- Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District — the largest concentration of 1920s–1940s Art Deco architecture in the world, centered on Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue two blocks east
- Bass Museum of Art — Miami Beach’s main art museum in a 1930 Art Deco building by Russell Pancoast, on Park Avenue five blocks north
- Wolfsonian — FIU Museum — a world-class collection of design, architecture, and material culture from the Gilded Age to the Cold War era, on Washington Avenue six blocks north
Sources
- Wikipedia: “Miami Beach Post Office”
- Living New Deal: “Post Office Murals — Miami Beach” (livingnewdeal.org)
- The Clio: “United States Post Office — Miami Beach” (theclio.com)
- Wikimedia Commons: Miami_Beach_Post_Office_33139_-_Washington_Avenue_13th_Street_South_Beach_03.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, Danie (Dpalma01)
Find it on the map
See this place and what’s around it →📷 Diventa un fotografo di Cultural Heritage Online
Condividi le tue foto dei luoghi: restano pubblicate con la tua firma come autore. Più vengono viste, più ti fai conoscere — e presto un concorso premierà le foto più apprezzate.
Accedi o registrati gratis per aggiungere una fotoDo you manage this place?
This page is read by travellers and heritage enthusiasts who find it on Google. Keep it accurate — and make it work for you. Free for non-profit heritage institutions.