Biggest Post Office TO BE BUILT IN CHICAGO

CHICAGO is to have the largest post office in the world. The fifty-acre, twelve-story building will be completed and ready for occupancy within about a year and a half, according to a recent announcement of the United States Post Office Department. It will be able to care for the 19,000.000 letters a day expected by 1943, in addition to the parcel post packages and newspapers. In one year, it is estimated, the total amount of mail handled would be sufficient to fill completely a structure four times its size.

More like a factory than a post office are the workings of this structure. Motor trucks, one every minute, will bring in letters from collection boxes throughout the city. These letters will be shot upward in elevators to the upper floors, and travel by gravity down through the building. By the time they reach the ground floor they will be canceled, sorted, and ready for dispatch by train or airplane. On this page our artist shows some of the mechanical devices behind the scenes that will speed letters.

In the parcel post room, for example, an attendant drops packages from a main belt upon conveyors that classify them by states. Where the volume of mail requires two conveyors for one state, mail for cities with the initials “A” to “L” goes on one belt, and “M” to “Z” on the other