The General Post Office in Gary was built in 1936 as a typical federal New Deal project. Centrally located in downtown, the size and grandness of the building probably reflected the need of that time as well as the propositions for the future. The architecture reflects the ideals of that time and although the building today is in a very bad shape, it does not take much of fantasy to imagine how elegant it must have looked like when it opened. With the steep decline in the city population during the 1960s and 1970s, the need for a GPO downtown diminished and somewhere in the 1970s, it closed for good. In the perspective of a population falling from 180,000 in 1960 to under 80,000 in 2010, one doesn't have to take today's decline of the postal system into account in order to understand the outcome.
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