Added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 11, 1985

We believe the building will grow old gracefully and we sincerely hope and trust that time will add that certain element to make this work of increasing pleasure to the citizens of this community.

Beverly Hills Post Office architect Ralph Flewelling, 1934

If you didn’t already know that the Wallis Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills is partially housed within a historic building, the signage gives it away. “PAULA KENT MEEHAN HISTORIC BUILDING” is emblazoned on the wall, just to the right of the front entrance. Turn around and you’ll see a tall lamppost, helpfully marked “HISTORIC LAMP.” Around the corner in the patio you’ve got the “HISTORIC BALCONY,” “HISTORIC BENCH” and “HISTORIC FLAGPOLE.” As you enter the front door of the Wallis, take heed – it is in fact a “HISTORIC DOOR” (one of several). Light streams in courtesy of several historic windows (each one marked “HISTORIC WINDOW,” naturally), and should you find yourself in need of a writing surface, seek out the ornate claw-foot table towards the western end of the main hall. You’ll know you’ve got the right one when you see the “HISTORIC TABLE” sign on the wall. 

Maybe the Wallis is a little over-the-top in its demonstration of this building’s historicness, but it’s not without good reason. The Wallis occupies what was once the Beverly Hills Post Office, easily the most opulent mail destination I’ve seen in Los Angeles County, and a remarkable building on its own.

Compared to the stripped down “starved classical” style of many post offices funded by the US federal government in the 1930s (see examples in Hollywood and San Pedro), the Beverly Hills  Post Office is positively lavish. Architect Ralph C. Flewelling (working with consulting architects Allison & Allison) turned in a renaissance revival edifice, worthy of an Italian nobleman’s palazzo. The main building is sheathed in Roman brick and rusticated terracotta, with ornamental pediments over the doorways.

Inside the Grand Hall you’ll find an entire quarry’s worth of marble in black, green and beige covering the walls and floors. The lobby’s lit by a series of pendant lamps and clerestory windows. The old postmaster office on the west wing of the building is paneled in walnut. These surfaces reflect both light and wealth.

The Grand Hall is also adorned by eight lunette frescos by Charles Kassler – two depicting the history of mail transportation (called “Post Rid­er” and ​“Air Mail”), the other six (“Con­struc­tion – PWA”) showing the difficulties of life during the Depression. The latter series of murals is supposedly the only California artwork funded by the US Treasury that depicts the difficulties of life during the Depres­sion. 

Beverly Hills was just under 20 years old when this building was completed in 1933, but it was growing at a rapid clip. The city’s population underwent a 54% increase in the 1930s, from 17,429 in 1930 to 26,823 in 1940. Before the Flewelling building, Beverly Hills was served by a much smaller post office from 1926, at Camden Drive and Brighton Way. That one outlived its usefulness after just a few years. 

According to Robert S. Anderson’s Beverly Hills: The First 100 Years, the trouble began when legendary actor and pundit, Will Rogers was named honorary mayor of Beverly Hills in 1926. The event was broadcast across the country in newsreels shown at movie theaters, which resulted in a deluge of thousands of letters sent each week to Rogers, mostly without a street address. 

When city officials traveled to Washington DC to plead their case for a new post office, the feds offered a paltry $85,000 – less than a third of what Beverly Hills had hoped for. So the city’s Chamber of Commerce sent representative Lon Haddock back to DC, armed with a strongly-worded letter from Will Rogers himself, addressed to the US Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon:

Dear Mr. Mellon – 

This will introduce to you Mr. Lon Haddock of Beverly Hills, California. It seems that you owe us $250,000 to build a post office and they can’t get the dough out of you, and I told them that I knew you and that you weren’t that kind of fellow at heart. So in place of suing you, why, he is going back there and see if he can’t jar you lose [sic] from it. We are getting a lot of mail out here now, and they are handling it in a tent. It is mostly circulars from Washington with speeches on prosperity, but it makes awful good reading while waiting for the foreclosure… 

Will Rogers, correspondence with US Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, 1930

Haddock returned from Washington with an agreement that the feds would come out to Beverly Hills to view the proposed site. And once they did, the US Treasury allocated $300,000 for the new post office, on the site of an old Pacific Electric Railway depot. While this was a federal building, the city’s agreement with the feds gave Beverly Hills oversight over architectural plans. Washington’s first plan was rejected for being incompatible with the Beverly Hills City Hall just across the street. Flewelling’s revised plans brought the front wall further back from the curb on Crescent Drive to allow for more landscaping, and space for a fountain that would visually harmonize with the reflecting pools of City Hall. Finally the plans were approved, and a groundbreaking ceremony took place on February 27, 1933. 

Some 15,000 people (~75% of the population of Beverly Hills!) attended the Beverly Hills Post Office’s opening celebration on April 28, 1934 – described by Anderson as “the biggest event ever to have happened in the city.” A huge parade swarmed the streets, starting at City Hall heading east, then looping down and back up to the post office by mid-afternoon. Onlookers witnessed patriotic marches and speeches from local dignitaries; there was a fashion show and a car show, vaudeville performances and a bathing suit pageant. All told, the day and evening events generated over $100,000 in sales for the vendors and stores at the post office opening – and keep in mind, this was in the middle of the Great Depression. 

Ellis Wales, publicist for the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce, estimated that some 45 million readers of major syndicated newspapers would have seen pictures of the celebration. That may have included these bizarre promotional shots of women in mailbags, taken to publicize the event (all four via the Eyre Powell Chamber of Commerce Collection / Los Angeles Public Library).

For over 60 years, this post office served the citizens of Beverly Hills well. But as the population grew, so did its needs. In 1990 a new, much larger USPS facility opened at 325 N. Maple, and federal budget cuts meant limited staffing at the Crescent & Santa Monica location. By 1993 the Postal Service considered the Flewelling building “surplus property.” 

Of course generations of Beverly Hillers considered the post office much more than “surplus property.” For many residents, it was one of the cornerstone civic buildings in the city, and a connection to its early history. In the late ‘90s a group of locals led by then-mayor Vicki Reynolds formed the nonprofit Beverly Hills Cultural Center Foundation with the express purpose of purchasing and adaptively reusing the building as a cultural center. They convinced the city of Beverly Hills to purchase the old post office from the USPS, and in 2004, philanthropist Wallis Annenberg granted $15 million from the Annenberg Foundation (plus an additional gift of $10 million later on) to preserve and expand it into the performing arts center that we see today.

The process of transforming the post office involved a careful restoration of the 1933 building. Studio Pali Fekete Architects restored each of Charles Kassler’s historic frescos, repaired bricks and terracotta roof tiles, refinished metalwork and discovered a gutter system that was hiding behind the eaves. The process also involved a rethink of how to incorporate the existing building into a new facility. The firm converted the original mail sorting room into an auxiliary theater; you can now buy tickets at the same counter where Beverly Hillers once bought stamps. 

Zoltan Pali also designed a new annex just south of the original building. The curved fountain from the Flewelling era is gone, replaced by the 500-seat Goldsmith Theater, clad in irregularly-shaped, copper-colored concrete that kinda look like postal envelopes. it’s a deliberate (if abstract) reference to the property’s past. 

Seen from above, the old and new buildings look like two Ts, wedged Tetris-style into the piano-shaped wedge of land where they sit. They speak to each other, from across the decades. But if you ever forget which of the two buildings is the historic one, there’s plenty of signage to remind you. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Anderson, Robert S.: Beverly Hills: The First 100 Years (Rizzoli, 2014 – via Beverly Hills Historical Society)

+ “Building History” (Wallis.org – via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine)

+ Chazanov, Mathis: “A Post Office Customer’s Dream–No Waiting : “Mail: While patrons languish in queues at other branches, the city’s new main office seldom has a line.” (Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1991)

+ “General Population by City, Los Angeles County: 1910 – 1950 U.S. Census” (LAAlmanac.com)

+ “Post Office (former) – Beverly Hills CA” (LivingNewDeal.org) 

+ Robertson, Doug, Beland/Associates, Inc.: Beverly Hills Post Office’s NRHP nomination form

+ “Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts” (LAConservancy.org)

+ “Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts” (ILoveBeverlyHills.com)

+ “Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts” (SPFA.com)