Remembrance of Mr. Finch and Things Past: The Greenwich Town Historian, the Historic Greenwich Post Office, and “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696” by the Muralist Victoria Ebbels Hutson Huntley
"Remembrance of Mr. Finch and Things Past: The Greenwich Town Historian, the Historic Greenwich Post Office, and “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696” by the Muralist Victoria Ebbels Hutson Huntley"
William E. Finch, Greenwich Town Historian Emeritus
“The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696,” Mural
Victoria Ebbels Hutson Huntley, Artist
The Historic Greenwich Post Office (1916)
Greenwich, Connecticut
Fig. 1 “Greenwich Harbor Aerial View” by Photographer Unknown, N.d. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Demonstrating a shared thematic devotion to the observation of life in early America, American painters Thomas Hart Benton and Victoria Hutson Huntley articulated the ordinary into a sense of heightened painted narratives containing a kaleidoscopic assortment of newly discovered American frontiers in their works of art. In The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s, a history of American Modern Art dating from the late 19th- to mid-20th centuries, the art critic Matthew Baigell observed that in his paintings, the Missouri-born artist Thomas Hart Benton, regarded as the foremost American regional painter, harnessed the forces which “transformed Indian lands successfully into frontier territories, rural areas, urban districts.”
Fig. 2 “America Today (1930-1931), Instruments of Power, Panel (egg tempera and linen canvas on wood) by Thomas Hart Benton” Photograph by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.d.
Fig. 3 “America Today (1930-1931), Midwest, Panel (egg tempera and linen canvas on wood) by Thomas Hart Benton” Photograph by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.d.
Baigell was referring to Benton’s painting “America Today” (1930-1931), his very first mural commission composed of ten egg tempera-on-linen canvas painted wood panels for The New School for Social Research in New York City. Benton’s “America Today” precipitated the WPA mural program (active 1935 to 1943) of the Great Depression Era (the Works Progress Administration was renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939; and disbanded at the start of WWII). In the position as an employer, the United States government hired creatives to work on public assignments for financial compensation and counted the American painters Lee Krasner, Rothko (Mark Rothko), Pollock (Jackson Pollock), and de Kooning (Willem de Kooning) – all known as famous artists today – as early employees. The all-encompassing scope of Benton’s painting “America Today,” and the painting genre of, well, America Today, impacted succeeding generations of American artists and muralists of the day (and even through the 1950s and onward).
Fig. 4 “Victoria Hutson Huntley Portrait” Photograph by Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, N.d. © Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum J0071369.
New Jersey-born artist Victoria Ebbels Hutson Huntley, for instance, transformed an overlooked modern day occurrence – the timely delivery of the mail – into an iconic visual narrative interlinking the overwhelming realities of “transformed Indian lands,” maritime, and farming histories of Greenwich during early British colonial days in her oil-on-canvas mural which the artist herself titled “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696.” Winner of a painting competition sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department, the Huntley mural was commissioned in the late 1930s for the Greenwich Post Office (designed 1916; completed by 1917) when a day trip from Grand Central Station to Greenwich (with its open fields, wildflowers, dust-brushed streetlike pathways, and seaside proximity) was thought of as a quaint excursion into the country(side).
Fig. 5 “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696” by Victoria Hutson Huntley, 1939” by Photographer Unknown. The image shows Huntley's mural now fully restored and in its new home at the Havemeyer Building, 290 Greenwich Avenue.
Greenwich Town Historian Emeritus William E. Finch is credited with bringing to light long-forgotten correspondence between Huntley and WPA administrators regarding the mural “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696.” The Greenwich mural was completed especially for the celebratory Greenwich Tri-Centennial of 1940 (commemorating the founding of Greenwich in 1640). As researched by Mr. Finch, the maths of the Greenwich Tri-Centennial establishes the date for the unveiling of “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696” as November 1939. The dedication of the mural followed on “Friday, December the first” 1939 (and not in 1937 as generally believed), according to Mr. Finch.
Teacher, muralist, landscape painter, portraitist, and cherished “Greenwich-phile,” Victoria Hutson Huntley, endeavored to gift Greenwich with a “truly beautiful and inspiring mural.” For her artist’s palette, the artist chose a restrained color scheme of predominantly yellow, ochre, and diffused tones of green pigments to underscore the complexities of rural society within the picturesque settings of the agrarian-based natural world depicted in “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696.” The color theme, also, underscored the significance of the ordinariness in the routine of everyday life during the British colonial period in Greenwich. This theme is, also, inferred in the title of the painting. The use of the word “packet,” for example, refers to Packet watercraft. These smallish and fast-moving sailing vessels, with any number of configurations of fore and aft rigging, were prototypes for the later designs of larger-scale clipper ships or dispatch boats. In the upper left background section of her mural “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696,” for example, Huntley shows the aft portion single mast with rigging as the vessel prepares for departure in Greenwich Harbour. During the 17th century, Packets transported mail and lightweight commodities (likely tobacco and indigo), for instance, in scheduled weekly relays first servicing coastal Europe then (by expanding the mail delivery, light freight, and “consumer” markets) to British coastal colonies with tweaks to the sailing schedules as travelling distances – and the tradewinds – necessitated.
Fig. 6 "Calais passengers preparing to board a Packet boat c. 1803 by Joseph Mallard Turner M Turner LS Print" by Photographer Unknown, N.d.
For Huntley’s painting, the destination was Greenwich where “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696” was first installed off the lobby of The Historic Greenwich Post Office (U.S. Post Office Building) on Greenwich Avenue which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Inside The Historic Greenwich Post Office (but, tucked away in a tidy space to the left of the main lobby as you enter the building), the panoramic narrative of “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696” unfolds in a vignette of early Greenwich settlers and colonial life painted across the upper portion of an interior wall, surrounding the wood framed glass-lites within a door, and its woodwork frame. The space functions to separate the work area of the industrious post office employees (intent on their assorted bins brimming with mail) from the public.
Fig. 7 “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696 (Detail), 1939” Photograph by Helen Neafsy, June 27, 2010.
Fig. 8 “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696 (Interior Detail), 1939” Photograph by Helen Neafsy, June 27, 2010. The door ahead opens into the Lobby on the main entrance at the north of the Historic Greenwich Post Office.
Fig. 9 “The Historic Greenwich Post Office (1916), 310 Greenwich Avenue” by Contributing Photographer © Courtesy Titian Butash Collection, December 7, 2024.
Designed in a stylized fusion of classic Hellenic-Egyptian and Roman influenced motifs, the slender columns of the Neoclassical-inspired The Historic Greenwich Post Office (1916) creates the outline of a graceful colonnade positioned to replicate the concave hemispherical design of the building’s porticoed façade. The design technique creates an organic adaptation of geometric form which balances the placement of the structure within the triangle-shaped architectural site on lower Greenwich Avenue at the Arch Street segue. The triangle plot was once owned by Henry O. Havemeyer who sold his bordering plot to the United States government for the construction of a post office. The Historic Greenwich Post Office was designed by the lead architect Louis A. Simon of the Engineering and Drafting Division of the Treasury Department; however, the listed architect is James A. Wetmore who received the appointment of Acting Supervising Architect of the U.S. Office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury.
Fig. 10 “The Historic Greenwich Post Office (1916) with Egyptian Style Obelisk (1927)” by Contributing Photographer © Courtesy Titian Butash Collection, December 7, 2024.
A pyramidal-topped Obelisk (1927) designed by Charles A. Platt honors the memory of townspeople who served in the global conflict of the Great War (1914-1918). "The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696" was restored after The United States Postal Service sold its venerable 1916 landmark building for $15 million to Greenwich Retail LLC in 2011 which is part of a business portfolio of real estate investment companies innovated by Mr. Peter Malkin of Greenwich (and co-helmed with his son, Anthony Malkin). Properties of Malkin père included the Empire State Building in 2013. Mr. Anthony Malkin serves as Chairman and CEO of Empire State Realty Trust.
During the 1930s, American architecture was best defined by the Art Deco style and the Empire State Building, the Art Deco style skyscraper (constructed 1930 to 1931), located between 33rd and 34th Streets on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan at Midtown South, symbolically defined New York. With its geometric rigidity, the architectural form of the Empire State Building, a modern skyscraper, references historic tower architecture which is the basis for all skyscraper design. The Empire State Building, its lower façade clad with Indiana limestone, was designed by the architectural firm of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon known for their repertoire of Art Deco works of architecture built, mostly, in Manhattan beginning 1920 to about 1989.
Fig. 11 "Empire State Building Dedication Plaque in Main Lobby at 350 Fifth Avenue (1930-1931)" by Contributing Photographer © Courtesy Titian Butash Collection, March 5, 2025. The bronze-tone dedication plaque, a low relief sculpture of the skyscraper, covers an expanse of the walls inside the marble-clad Main Lobby of the Empire State Building, an iconic symbol of America and namesake of its homestate of New York, called the Empire State: its aspirational motto "Excelsior," fittingly, means "Higher."
Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s original design for the Empire State Building featured a conical pyramidal-shaped roof (at the 102nd floor; and accessible by stairs) pierced at the pinnacle by a needle-like nautical ship’s mast. This top floor (designed as the point for disembarkment for paying passengers) was to function as an airship docking station with the base of the “mast” four storeys overhead (positioned at the 106th floor) to accommodate the mooring of dirigible balloons, or aerostat aircraft. First developed in the late 19th century in Europe, these cumbersome yet lighter-than-oxygen-fueled and hydrogen- and helium-gas lifted airships had manual steering capabilities to navigate through the sky. Aerodynamics aside, these luxury airships initially designed for leisure travel would be docked and secured with metal cable restraints, rather tethered, to the building’s spire. But, these days, the Empire State Building is instead called "home" by many prestigious business tenants, and its mooring dock mast now serving as a spire, mostly, houses antennae (installed in 1953) for (radio and television) broadcasting and communications systems, also, onsite at the nearly-One Century old (by modern day standards) "trophy" skyscraper.
Fig. 12 "Goodyear’s ‘blimp,’ doing stunts to try to deliver a sack of the day’s press to the Empire State Mast, October 1, 1931” by Photographer Unknown, October 1, 1931. The 50 ton metal mast atop the Empire State Building was designed to function as a mooring dock for "zeppelins" (namesake of their European inventor Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin; but, more popularly the flying balloons were called "blimps") during the early days of aviation when the design of modern New York was envisioned as a Futurist cityscape.
Fig. 13 "Havemeyer Building (1892)" by Contributing Photographer © Courtesy Titian Butash Collection, December 7, 2024. The Havemeyer Building is "right across the street" from the Historic Greenwich Post Office.
And, about thirty miles away from New York City in idyillic Greenwich, the watercraft-inspired mural depicting a single-masted Packet boat departing Greenwich Harbour in the late-17th century, “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696” by Victoria Ebbels Hutson Huntley, now resides at Henry O. Havemeyer's namesake Romanesque-inspired Italianate style building right across the street from The Historic Greenwich Poat Office.
The Historic Greenwich Post Office is within walking distance to Greenwich Harbour and Long Island Sound where once the Packet sailed from Greenwich. And, although formerly in need of restoration, the pictorial narrative “The Packet Sails from Greenwich, 1696” still visually transports the viewer back in time to a formative period in America and American art history as well as, seemingly, to a nostalgic Greenwich of yesterdays when an esteemed town historian generously shared his knowledge of his beloved hometown.
Titian Butash
Greenwich, Connecticut
* * *
First published in Greenwich Time, Architecture, May 1985.
Modified December 31, 2024.
Modified January 2, 2025.
Last Modified April 28, 2025.
(c) Titian Butash All rights reserved
References
“Artist Victoria Hutson Huntley.” SAAM, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/victoria-hutson-huntley-2366. Accessed December 30, 2024.
Bridge, John. “The ‘Old’ Greenwich Post Office.” Greenwich Historical Society. https://greenwichhistory.org/the-old-greenwich-post-office/. Accessed December 31, 2024.
Spray, Aaron. “An Unlikely Airport | Cool: The Empire State Building Was Built With An Airship Mooring Mast.” Simple Flying. April 14, 2024.
https://simpleflying.com/empire-state-building-airship-mooring-mast-history/. Accessed April 26, 2025.Images
Fig. 1 Photographer Unlisted. “Greenwich Harbor Aerial View.” N.d. Photographer Unknown. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. https://www.nae.usace.army.mil/Missions/Civil-Works/Navigation/Connecticut/Greenwich-Harbor/. Accessed January 1, 2025.
