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Built in 1921 as a ticket office for the Cunard Passenger Ship Line, the grand interior of the Great Hall of the Cunard Building shows how the popular Beaux Art style was adapted to a new use.

The architect Benjamin Wistar Morris collaborated with muralist Ezra Winter to produce a decorative program focused on shipping themes, set within a huge vaulted space that recalls Roman bath buildings. In contrast to the ceremonial Great Hall, the exterior is a simple Renaissance facade topped with a relatively undistinguished high-rise. The Great Hall was converted into a branch of the U.S. Postal Service in 1977.

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“What matters most …is its great booking hall, with its elaborately decorated groined and conical vaults. It was in this grand setting that passage on such liners as the Queen Mary and the two Queen Elizabeths was purchased.”

In any event, the ticketing hall will drop your jaw and make you long for the days of great oceanliners. A May 21, 1921 article in The New York Times described the 65-foot-high, 185-foot-long hall as “a series of mural decorative effects probably unsurpassed in the annals of commercial building construction.”

“From the tinted plaster background of these figures the observer gets his first hint of the blaze of color in which the whole scheme of decorations is conceived. Warm, heavy blues, reds, yellows, umbers and tans predominate to blend in a whole reminiscent of the talian primitives. Passing on into a groined vault you look up to see the seals of English shipping towns as a central fature while below in niches connecting the vaults with the walls of Roman Travertine stone are bas-reliefs portraying the four winds and the four sesons. At the far end of the hall, the Greenwich Street side, is a smilar groined vault, similarly treated. Between them is the great central dome containing four roundels of mythological marble figures. Below this dome on the four pendentives are large representations of the vessels in which Leif Ericsson, Columbus, Cabot and Drake pioneered on the Atlantic Ocean. In panels on the walls are maps of the continents executed by Barry Faulkner on the theory of Mercator’s projection but treated deoratively with the same glow of color and touch of mythogical interest”