Death, taxes, and the decline of a building
By NewsPress Now
The deadline for filing income taxes came and went this month with hardly a visible wisp of activity at the U.S. post office in Downtown St. Joseph.
Not so long ago, vehicles lined the streets outside the building as procrastinators dropped off income tax returns before the midnight deadline. The big change involves the way taxes are delivered to Uncle Sam. As of late March, the Internal Revenue Service reported that 96% of 80.5 million returns were delivered electronically.
There’s no point trying to go back in time or lamenting the change. The world conducts its business electronically now. The IRS was forced to respond.
It is sad, however, to see St. Joseph’s Downtown post office building become a shell of what it used to be. Even if more taxpayers relied on the old snail mail, it’s worth asking if anyone would know that St. Joseph has a Downtown post office or where to find it.
It wasn’t always this way. The building opened in the late 1930s and still contains a corner plaque with the name of the Roosevelt administration’s treasury secretary. For decades, this imposing building served as a federal office building and housed the post office, the IRS, the FBI, a courtroom and district offices for this area’s elected representative in Congress. Today, only the U.S. Postal Service remains inside the building.
The sad state of affairs can’t be attributed solely to electronic commerce. The building once anchored a Downtown that served as St. Joseph’s focal point for business and government activities. As a federal office building, it hollowed out along with the rest of the Downtown.
A turnaround won’t happen overnight. Like George Costanza exclaiming, “I’m back, baby!,” there’s always something premature and laughable about predictions of Downtown’s renewal.
It would be nice to see this building repurposed for some kind of commercial use, but that’s a tall task given the current economic realities. For all the talk of vacant housing and empty retail space, it’s easy to overlook how many underutilized office buildings exist in St. Joseph. This is a national issue that reflects the change in work patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic. In St. Joseph, a city associated with manufacturing more than white-collar office activity, commercial property vacancies might prove even harder to fill.
And even harder to fill in a Depression-era building that gives an impression of the overall neighborhood’s irreversible decline. Like death and taxes, the cratered Downtown post office building leaves an observer with a sense of inevitability.
