Walk through the doors of the old Franklin Station Post Office today, and it feels more like stepping into a moment that never finished happening than touring a historic building.
An issue of the Napa Valley Register from August 2014 still sits in the employee area, untouched since the week the South Napa earthquake struck. Old advertisements and informational posters curl on the walls. A catwalk stretches above the former mail-handling floor, built in an era before video surveillance, so supervisors could look down and keep an eye on postal workers below.
The Napa Valley Register got a firsthand look inside the shuttered post office on Aug. 4, walking through spaces the public hasn’t been able to access in more than a decade, just weeks after the Napa City Council unanimously approved the final entitlements to convert the historic building into a 94-room hotel. The July 21 vote capped a years-long effort to save the building after it was severely damaged in the 2014 earthquake.
Throughout the building are reminders of the damage caused by the earthquake — thin spiderweb cracks running along the walls, missing chunks of wall where the hollow interior brick collapsed, all covered in a thin layer of dust.
Not everything from that history will survive the coming renovation. The utilitarian back-of-house spaces — the mail room, the warehouse-like sorting areas — will be demolished to make way for the new hotel.
But the building’s centerpiece, the lobby where generations of Napa residents once came to collect their mail, buy stamps and catch up with neighbors, will be restored and become the hotel’s entryway. The old post office boxes, many still bearing the names of past renters, will be repurposed inside. So will two safes from the building’s operations.
Above it all, the intricate blue-and-gold ceiling and the original marble wainscoting will be restored to their condition when the building opened in 1933. That lobby was, according to historical accounts compiled by Napa County Landmarks, something special from the start.
“Artistic and modern in every detail, the new Napa post office will be one of the most beautiful buildings in this city,” the Napa Valley Register reported in April 1932, while the building was still under construction.
When it opened the following October, the Napa Journal called it “one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, federal buildings of any city of similar size in the entire country.”
The Register added that “the beauty of the lobby will beyond any doubt prove a surprise to those who visit the building.”
The building was designed by Will G. Corlett, a Napa-born architect working for the Oakland firm Reed & Corlett, with his father, prominent local architect William Henry Corlett, serving as supervising architect on the project — a small multigenerational footnote in a building that was, at the time, a genuinely big deal for the city. When the $140,000 building opened on Oct. 29, 1933, the city built a speakers’ platform for the occasion, and Postmaster James Gillies threw the doors open for public tours.
The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on Jan. 11, 1985, cementing its status as one of only a handful of Art Deco post offices in California. The listing cited the building’s well-preserved condition, its geometric massing and terracotta ornamentation, and the decorative finishes inside the lobby — the same features now driving the cost and complexity of its restoration.
In 2010, Congress voted unanimously to rename the building the Tom Kongsgaard Post Office Building, honoring Thomas Kongsgaard, a Napa County Superior Court judge who served 26 years on the bench before his death in 2001. It was Kongsgaard’s second local tribute — the county had already renamed the courthouse square for him decades earlier.
Then came the earthquake. Christine Madrid French, executive director of Napa County Landmarks, said the damage looked deceptively simple from the outside — like something that could just be patched.
It wasn’t.
“You actually have to deconstruct the whole thing,” French said, describing how badly compromised the building’s structure was, and how much of what will go back into it has to be entirely rebuilt, seismic reinforcement included, using salvaged and matched materials wherever possible.
It’s part of why the rehabilitation carries an estimated price tag of $10 million to $13 million, even though only the historic front quarter of the building — the lobby and the façade — is being preserved.
Preservation is legally guaranteed through a covenant Napa County Landmarks holds on the property, negotiated as a condition of the sale after the U.S. Postal Service moved to demolish the earthquake-damaged building.
More information on the history of Franklin Station is available napacountylandmarks.org/landmark/napa-franklin-station-u-s-post-office.
