Rally to Save Venice Main Post Office

A rally will be held Saturday afternoon to save the 1939 Venice Main Post Office and its historic "Story of Venice" mural.

The rally will be held from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Venice Main Post Office, 1601 Main St.  at the west end of Windward Circle.

The U.S. Postal Service plans to close the post office and sell it with some of its services being relocated to the nearby Venice Carrier Annex. The Postal Regulatory Commission recently failed to acknowledge its jurisdiction over the closure and it has been designated as a "relocation," which has stripped it of protection from a moratorium applied to most of the 3,700 post offices on the nationwide closure consideration list, said Jed Pauker, a rally organizer.

The planned closure has rallied a diverse group of Venice interest groups who all support keeping the post office open. Those groups include: Free Venice Beachhead, Venice Arts Council, Venice Chamber of Commerce, the Venice Stakeholders Association, Los Angeles Conservancy, City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, Congresswoman Janice Hahn and the Venice Neighborhood Council.

An online pettion to save the post office has more than 400 signatures and legal challenges also are being considered.

The 1939 art deco post office was built during the Great Depression under the federal Works Project Administration and is the last WPA building remaining in downtown Venice. The post office features a mural known as the "Story of Venice" or the "First Thirty Years of Venice's History" and is one of two remaining murals by artist Edward Biberman.

The Venice Main Post Office recently has had low levels of service and has not "historically met the USPS' standard of providing window services to the public within five minutes," Hahn wrote in a November letter to the Postal Regulatory Commission. The plans to close three customer service windows and relocate two customer service windows to the Venice Carrier Annex is "unacceptable," Hahn wrote.