ABSTRACT
The post-world War II period saw a surplus of older federal office buildings, post offices, custom houses, and court houses. These buildings, that manifestly expressed the role of the national government within small towns and metropolitan areas, were viewed by most federal agencies as out of date, hard to maintain, and unadaptable to modern uses. Others viewed these great white elephant buildings as keystones to the revitalization of local communities as urban renewal became the principle approach to planning during the baby boom generation. Surplus federal buildings were at the center of a conflict between the General Services Administration and the National Park Service and its partners within the historic preservation movement. The decades-long story of the fight to adaptive use the Old United States Mint in San Francisco, California serves as a case study for understanding the bureaucratic context in which decisions about which buildings were demolished and which ones were preserved. The fate of surplus federal architecture set important precedents for the wider historic preservation movements during the 1960s and 1970s.
