Los Angeles Terminal Annex Grand Opening and Postal Operations 24 Image Archive Documenting the City’s Central Mail Processing Facility, 1940

Los Angeles U S. Post Office

Photograph

Los Angeles Terminal Annex grand opening photo archive, 1940, recording the ceremony and early operation of the post office facility that served as Los Angeles’s central mail processing plant from 1940 until 1985. Built at 900 North Alameda Street near Union Station, the Terminal Annex opened as a major postal facility for a rapidly expanding city whose mail depended on rail connections, truck transfer, parcel handling, and clerk labor. The archive places the opening ceremony beside the practical work of the building, moving from shovel ceremonies and crowded public dedication scenes to sorting rooms, service counters, loading platforms, U.S. Mail trucks, and air mail transfer at the airport.

Photo archive of 24 Large silver gelatin prints, most 8 x 10 inches, Los Angeles, California, 1940. Civic officials and postal personnel gather at a groundbreaking scene with shovels and a wheelbarrow; a large audience fills the newly completed public lobby for the dedication ceremony; and finished interiors include long service counters beneath pendant lights, parcel post windows, registry signs, and rows of wall mounted service fixtures. Postal employees sort letters in an interior workroom lined with pigeonholes, carts, trays, and task lamps, while other scenes record mail bags and parcel sacks piled on loading docks, transferred from U.S. Mail trucks, stacked beside depot platforms, and handled near aircraft marked TWA, Mainliner Lake Huron, Texaco, and Trans World Airlines. Additional images include a woman leaning from a mail vehicle beside a “Mail Your Christmas Parcels Today” poster, a uniformed postal worker using a time clock, and several numbered press style prints showing delivery trucks, depot labor, and heavy mail sacks under warehouse signs for shipping and receiving departments. Some photos stamped en verso, "Seth Bryant, Room 214, Terminal Annex, Los Angeles 52, California."

Opened in May 1940 with the formal dedication the following month, the Terminal Annex marked the city’s shift toward a centralized postal plant built for the scale of modern Los Angeles. The scenes preserve both the public ceremony of a new federal building and the working routines that gave the building its purpose: counter service, parcel handling, sorting tables, clocked labor, truck loading, rail side transfer, and air mail movement. Light handling wear, minor surface marks, and occasional annotations or numbering visible on several prints; images generally clear and complete. Overall in very good condition. The archive gives a direct 1940 record of the Los Angeles post office Terminal Annex at the moment it opened and began operating as the city’s main mail processing facility.

Item #23413

Price: $750.00