As a child, I looked forward to the regular trips with my mom to our local post office in the Hill Country town of Boerne. I can still smell the cardboard boxes and recall the excitement of buying stamps to send letters to my international pen pals and shipping Christmas presents to my uncle in faraway Nebraska.
Starting in the early 1900s, U.S. post offices served as a community hub. Texans would catch up with neighbors, pay taxes at the teller window, pick up food stamps, and check out the “Most Wanted” posters (just in case). Post offices no longer play a role in most Americans’ routines. Although my hometown post office is still open, thousands have closed across the country. But these buildings, from the one-room structures in small towns to the grand, marble-floored edifices of county seats, carry a strong sense of nostalgia. Texans have repurposed and given a second life to shuttered post offices, putting their own stamp on these historic buildings. Here are six worth noting.
Austin
Drive down Speedway through the tree line historic Hyde Park, and you’ll pass by one of the newest hot spots in town, both day and night, with a crowd often milling around outside. The 10,000-square-foot midcentury building that served as the neighborhood post office from 1960 to 2021 now beckons locals and tourists alike with several businesses. First Light, an independent bookstore and café, opens its coffee window every morning at 7 a.m. and its doors from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. It hosts many events, from weekly chess clubs and story times to author readings. Also in the complex are Tiny Grocer, a specialty market and delicatessen, and Bureau de Poste, a French restaurant that serves dinner and weekend brunch. One more tenant, a new location of Allday Pizza, will open this fall in between First Light and Tiny Grocer.
Tiny Grocer owner Steph Steele was looking for a second, larger location for her upscale food store when a friend recommended she check out the vacant building after the USPS opted not to renew its lease. It was the right spot not only for her store, but also for a larger restaurant. The former mail sorting area now features wooden shelves stocked with locally produced culinary goods and housewares, as well as a deli, coffee bar, and banquette and counter seating for thirty. For the restaurant, Steele partnered with her friend, chef Jo Chan, and they came up with the concept for Bureau de Poste (“post office” in French), which uses Tiny Grocer’s interior dining space as well as the adjoining two-thousand-square-foot patio, once the loading dock for mail trucks, and now a lovely spot for dining al fresco under the string lights. Bistro guests are greeted by a blue painting of a mailman holding a serving tray. “There are some winks and nods to the neighborhood [to show that] we know you loved the post office,” Steele says.
Georgetown
With its marbled and maple floors, gold elevator, and lobby walls of red granite, the Georgian Revival–style former post office is now an upscale steakhouse. Situated just off the downtown square in Georgetown, about thirty miles north of Austin, City Post Chophouse welcomes diners through a wooden vestibule entryway. Inside the lobby, they face a wall of 84 original mailboxes, now reserved for members enrolled in a City Post program that, for an annual fee, gives them access to discounts, events, and their own mailbox for monthly gifts, such as a home cocktail kit or a set of tumblers. “You go check your mail once a month, and instead of getting a bill, you get something fun, like a bottle of wine,” owner Kevin Cummins says. Tucked just off the lobby, a private office that once belonged to the postmaster (and later the mayor) has been converted into a butcher shop and market selling fresh cuts of quality meats and Texas goods.
The three-story building served as a post office for Williamson County from 1932 until 1990, when the city of Georgetown bought it and turned it into city hall. After a new city hall was built in 2018, the property stood vacant until Cummins and his wife, Rachel, who own the popular Sweet Lemon Inn and Sweet Lemon Kitchen, bought and restored the space to its former grandeur, opening City Post in 2021.
The former mail sorting area is now an elegant dining room lined with spacious brown leather banquettes. From the modern, exposed kitchen, chef Adrian Corkill and his team serve wood-fired cuts of meat and fresh seafood. Follow the progression of the historic black-and-white photographs hanging around the room that detail the site’s century-long evolution from a livery stable. Regulars try to claim a spot at the eight-seat bar featuring a brass tap that runs from the ceiling—the cocktail menu boasts drinks with names such as First Class, Pony Express, and Air Mail. In September, City Post will unveil its new Prohibition-style speakeasy in the lower level, complete with a cigar lounge, live jazz and blues, and cocktails served from the bar that formerly resided in the Brown Bar in downtown Austin.
Graham
For more than twenty years, the former post office in Graham, about ninety miles northwest of Fort Worth, has served as the cultural and artistic hub for the community of about nine thousand residents. The Old Post Office Museum and Art Center, which opened in 2002, celebrates the town’s history, culture, and art with both permanent and rotating exhibits. “We want to be a place where kids who never leave the small town of Graham can still come and experience something that they would not get [in] Graham normally,” museum director Lyndsey Browning says.
Built in 1936, the art deco–style building, which served as the town’s post office until 1993, stands on what is billed as the largest downtown square in America. The original post office sign still hangs outside, sometimes causing the occasional disoriented visitor to ask if they can mail a letter, Browning says. A Depression-era mural titled Oil Fields of Graham, commissioned by the federal government as part of a movement to foster the culture of rural towns in post offices across the state, still adorns the foyer.
Look high up on the walls of the art gallery, and you’ll spot the slits that the postmaster would peer through from a hidden catwalk when he wanted to keep an eye on the business below. Join the locals for an “Evening with Dorman,” an occasional program where Young County historian Dorman Holub shares stories of rarely told tidbits of Graham history. The gallery will display contemporary paintings from Fort Worth artist Linda Leonhart-McCall in July, followed by the September debut of a Lonesome Dove exhibition of 55 still photographs from the 1989 CBS miniseries.
Houston
A sprawling nine-block sequence of buildings downtown, the Barbara Jordan Post Office once reigned as the city’s hub of the U.S. mail system. Opened in 1961 and renamed after the pioneering Black congresswoman in the mid-eighties, the site featured several nuclear bomb shelters. Soon after the post office closed in 2015, Lovett Commercial began developing it into a massive mixed-use space, reopening it in 2021 as Post Houston, complete with a food hall, office space, concert venue, and a rooftop park.
Walk up to the white main building and you’ll spot the city’s only Barbara Jordan statue, which developers unveiled in December. Inside, the soaring two-story warehouse ceilings tower above. Thanks to the architectural design of OMA New York, natural light now pours in from high chambers of windows. Industrial signage tacked onto exposed columns and chips of post office–blue paint nod to the warehouse’s former life as a mail sorting and processing hub, intentionally preserved details that earned Post Houston a National Register of Historic Places designation.
The three main atriums each feature a three-story staircase that defines the space’s visual aesthetic. In the O Atrium, named after its double-helix staircase, wander among international food stalls from the more than thirty restaurant vendors serving everything from Cajun and neo-Fjordic to Tex-Mex and Chinese dim sum; the bright neon displays give the feel of a futuristic Asian night market. The X Atrium, whose centerpiece X-shaped staircase nods to the grand interiors of Houston theaters, holds rotating art installations and doubles as an event venue that can hold two thousand people. The atrium also contains a micro-retail village called ShopX that showcases a network of small local retailers. The elegant, wood-finished stairwell in the Z Atrium zigzags past three floors of coworking spaces and Jackson’s Brew Coffee Co. bar on the ground floor. Each staircase leads out onto the Skylawn, a five-acre rooftop park with a skyline view. Skylawn boasts the one-acre Skyfarm, a sustainable garden where visitors harvest organic produce every Wednesday, as well as a covered event venue, meditative walking paths, and plenty of room for picnics and yoga classes.
Attached to one side of the building is the 713 Music Hall, a Live Nation venue with a capacity of five thousand people, housed in the former postmaster’s headquarters. This summer, the venue will host artists including Bryson Tiller, Aaron Lewis, and Joshua Bassett.
Montgomery
Just inside the front doors of a red brick building on Liberty Street downtown dates to 1910, sixty brass post office boxes are labeled with the names of the families who founded Montgomery, about an hour north of Houston, in the 1830s. Many of their descendants still live in Montgomery, hailed as the birthplace of the Texas flag. “That shows to me what deep roots we have in Montgomery, and it’s just really something that makes you think back to when people would ride their horses or their wagons into town to get the mail,” says Bea Rouse, a member of the Montgomery Historical Society, which owns the building and leases it to an antiques store.
The structure originally housed a grocery store and, by the 1920s, a pharmacy. In 1936, the drugstore began sharing space with the post office, which moved from across town. When townsfolk walked in the door, the post office and its brass mailboxes were on the right, and a drugstore counter with stools was on their left. The pharmacist at the time, W.J. Smith, doubled as the postmaster. Eventually, the Smith family donated the building to the historical society, which decided to lease the building to a tenant to honor its entrepreneurial origins. It’s now home to Rustic Cashmere Antiques and Gifts, where proprietor Kambra Drummond often chats with customers about the building’s legacy as they browse the aisles of vintage home decor. Rouse says that locals believe the store receives a ghostly visitor at the same time every other week—the front door opens on its own accord and a ghost rancher comes in to collect his mail.
New Braunfels
The first federally built post office in Texas is now home to McAdoo’s Seafood Restaurant, a popular spot serving oysters on the half shell, Cajun specialties, and, on Sundays, a bloody Mary bar. The red brick building with grand white columns, which served as the Hill Country town’s post office from 1915 to 1985, changed hands several times before Pat and Becky Wiggins bought the place in 2007 and named their new restaurant after William McAdoo, who was the secretary of treasury at the time the post office was built. Repurposed postal equipment, such as wrought-iron signs reading “letterbox” to the wooden parking curbs for mail trucks, can be found around the restaurant, which still has the original oak and pine floors. “We’ve felt like we’ve brought something back to the community because they hadn’t been in here since the eighties,” Becky says. “When we first opened, people would come in and they would be telling their kids, ‘Oh when I was your age, I used to come here with my parents and check our mail.’ Because people used to really go to the post office, not like now. It was a social gathering place almost, a community place.”
Take a left out of the lobby, lined with former teller windows, and a pink granite door will take you into the former postmaster office, a large space now filled with tables and brown leather booths. The Wigginses framed the original blueprint plans, and the lofty ceilings in the main dining room reveal exposed red brick and steel beams. The couple transformed the old loading dock into an expansive covered outdoor patio, with a bar, grill, and a stage featuring live jazz performances on Thursday evenings this summer.
When McAdoo’s first opened its doors, no one in New Braunfels, except for former postal employees, had ever seen behind the teller windows. “When we opened it up, everybody loved to reminisce about the lobby. But when they came in, they couldn’t believe how grand it was behind the windows,” Pat says.
- More About:
- Style & Design
- Architecture
