Antique & Vintage Postcards

A grand Beaux-Arts federal post office anchors a quiet Ithaca street corner in this hand-colored divided-back postcard, its arched windows and Corinthian pilasters glowing warmly against a peachy evening sky — mailed from the very building it depicts, on January 26, 1915. A large bare-limbed tree dominates the foreground, streetcar rails glint on the cobblestone below, and gas lamp standards flank the entrance steps, conjuring a prosperous upstate New York city at the height of the Progressive Era. The sender filled the message space with a dense, slanted cursive script addressed to a D.E. Rimer at 2239 Penn Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania — a personal correspondence now a century old, carrying the quiet intimacy of early twentieth-century letter-writing culture.