A massive, ornate building in Mexico City's Centro Historico houses the central post office, the Palacio Postal. For my money, it is everything a public building should be: imposing, impressive, a statement about the rectitude and permanence of the State.
Marble floors, gilded columns, filigreed railings—it's hard to imagine that all this is necessary to house civil service flunkies hunched over ledgers.
It is a working post office even today: customers apply at barred teller's cages to buy stamps and mail packages. The dozens of windows are no longer necessary to handle the press of customers. The economy of email and the reliability of delivery services like Estafeta and DHL have eaten into Mexpost's business.
My primary interest in visiting the central post office was the rumored existence of a postal museum. I was an avid stamp collector when I was young, and I still like to look at old stamps. I was hoping to see stuff like this showpiece 1856 Hidalgo issue.
Alas, most of the exhibits are mailbags, mailboxes, and old photographs. I saw nothing there of philatelic interest. Instead I found this familiar image of the Chichimec god Huitzilopochtli perched on a cactus eating a snake, volcanoes Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl in the background. What is it doing in a postal museum?
Well, it is a mosaic made up of thousands of canceled Mexican postage stamps. Someone laboriously soaked them off envelopes, sorted them into a palette of colors, and glued them onto a large board. The image is so big I could hardly cram it into the frame of my camera. Not exactly postal history, nevertheless one might charitably say it is postage-related.
So the museum has little to offer, but the central post office itself is so spectacular it hardly matters.
A legacy of the Porfirion Díaz regime, the Palacio Postal was designed by Adam Boari, who also designed Bellas Artes just across the Reforma. That it continues to be used as a working post office is remarkable. Undoubtedly it will be preserved, but in what form remains to be seen. When ordinary citizens can no longer mail letters there, something irreplaceable will be lost.
Hello,
Happy New Year. I have been checking out your blog for a few months and everytime I notice how fantastic your photographs are. I know nothing about photography but yours constantly impress me. Now that is all I have to say!!!
Thank you
Posted by: Ophelia | 01/03/2010 at 10:32 PM