The old Lowell Post Office

Granite left rough from the quarry, round arches and deep-set windows: the language of the house on the hill, built for the federal government a decade later.

The federal government bought the corner of Appleton and Gorham Streets, where St. Peter’s Church had stood since 1841, in 1890 and built a new post office there: a monumental granite building in the Romanesque manner of H. H. Richardson, its walls left rough from the quarry, with wide round arches and deep-set windows. Like every federal building of its day it came from the Office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury in Washington; the National Register nomination attributes the design to Willoughby J. Edbrooke, Supervising Architect in 1891–92, whose Worcester federal building it closely resembles.

The builders were Staples Brothers of Lowell. Work began on March 16, 1893, and after many delays the building opened in April 1895. It served as the city’s main post office until the new one on East Merrimack Street opened in the 1930s, then housed the school department’s offices, and since 2001, restored, the Juvenile Court.

Still to check

Edbrooke as designer (the nomination’s attribution; an earlier source named William Freret).
The year the post office moved to East Merrimack Street: 1933 (city) or 1936 (National Register).

Sources

The architect: Willoughby J. Edbrooke

1843–1896

A Chicago architect who, with his partner Franklin P. Burnham, designed the Georgia State Capitol and the Main Building at the University of Notre Dame, Edbrooke was Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury in 1891–92 — the office that designed every federal building in the country — and held to the Richardsonian Romanesque as the Beaux-Arts style was coming in. The National Register nomination for Lowell’s post office attributes its design to him.

Sources: National Register of Historic Places nomination, Lowell Post Office, NRIS 02001084; Wikipedia, “Willoughby J. Edbrooke” (for the works outside Lowell).

In Lowell

The Post Office, 1893–95 — 89 Appleton Street (attributed)

Elsewhere

Main Building, University of Notre Dame (with Burnham), 1879 — Notre Dame, Indiana
Georgia State Capitol (with Burnham), 1884–89 — Atlanta
Wheeler Opera House, 1888–89 — Aspen, Colorado
The Government Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 — Chicago (demolished)