Willoughby J. Edbrooke and the Romanesque Revival Post Office

The Old Post Office is often credited simply to "the office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury", the federal bureau that designed post offices, customs houses and courthouses across the country. The man in charge when its plans were drawn in 1891 was Willoughby James Edbrooke, a Chicago architect whose career touched some of the best-known buildings in the Midwest and South.

A Chicago career

Edbrooke (1843–1896) built his practice in Chicago in the years after the Great Fire of 1871. His best-known works before Washington were the Main Building at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, with its gilded dome, completed in 1879, and the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, designed with Franklin P. Burnham and completed in 1889. Both are confident, eclectic public buildings meant to announce an institution from a distance, a quality the Old Post Office tower shares.

The Supervising Architect

Edbrooke held the post of Supervising Architect of the Treasury for only a short time in the early 1890s. The office was enormous, with dozens of draughtsmen producing designs for federal buildings in every state, and its chiefs often changed with administrations. The Old Post Office was the largest and most prominent project of his tenure. He died in 1896, three years before it was completed.

The Richardson effect

The style Edbrooke chose had been made famous by Henry Hobson Richardson, whose Trinity Church in Boston and Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh set a fashion for heavy rough-faced stone, broad round arches and powerful towers. After Richardson's death in 1886, "Richardsonian Romanesque" spread to city halls, railway stations and federal buildings nationwide. The Old Post Office is one of the largest late examples, and its architects enriched the formula with Byzantine capitals, French Gothic dormers and Renaissance details. The full description is on our architecture page.

A family of builders

Willoughby's brother Frank E. Edbrooke became one of Denver's leading architects, designing among other things the Brown Palace Hotel, which opened in 1892 and is still one of the grandest historic hotels in the West. The two brothers' buildings make a neat pair for anyone interested in how nineteenth-century public buildings later found second lives as hotels, a theme we follow in historic hotels turned casino resorts.