The Post Office building for Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, serving the X1A postal codes, is located at the southwest corner of 49th Street and Franklin (50th) Avenue. It is a two-storey concrete building in a late modernist style dating to the mid-20th century. In 2006 it was designated a City of Yellowknife Heritage Site in recognition of its long standing role as a social centrepiece for the downtown community; it has been administratively listed on the Canadian Register of Historic Places as a result. "This is where you went to find everybody" in the 1960s, one city councillor recalled when the building received its heritage plaque in 2010.
It was the first federal government building constructed in what is now referred to as Yellowknife's New Town. The city had begun during the 1930s as a gold mining community on a peninsula and islands in the bay named for it on Great Slave Lake. When the boom resumed after World War II, it quickly outgrew the space available there, and New Town began to develop to the south on higher ground. The post office was completed in 1956 as the centralized, downtown location for mail services for Canada Post; it also housed the territorial courts until 1978. Both functions made it an important civic presence that helped establish New Town.
During later decades, the building lost some of its prominence, as federal agencies that had been housed there moved elsewhere in downtown Yellowknife for more space and the city grew too large for all of its residents to receive their mail there through general delivery. It underwent some physical changes as well. A 1958 renovation added a rear pavilion, and a fire ten years later resulted in the reconstruction of the upper floor. In the 1990s it was extensively renovated and underwent significant changes to its exterior although the building's basic form remains. In 2010 it was deemed surplus. Since 2010 it has been privately owned and leased back to Canada Post. In 2014 the city's removal of the benches in response to complaints about the behaviour of local homeless people led to a sit-in protest by local residents.
Building
The post office is situated on a corner lot in an urban area of low- and high-rise buildings with some parking lots interspersed amid a grid pattern of numbered streets and avenues. This level and type of development continues for several blocks in all directions. The terrain is generally level, at the top of a rise coming up from the lake, roughly in elevation.
On the opposite side of 49th Street, the intersection's northwest corner, is a bank branch, with the seven-storey YK Centre office building just down the street. The northeast corner is occupied by a six-story modernist building that houses some territorial government offices. Across 50th Avenue, signed and referred to as Franklin Avenue, is a fast-food restaurant on the corner and the entrance to the Centre Square Mall complex, topped with a three-storey hotel and, a block to the east, the Northern Heights tower, Yellowknife's tallest building. Southwest of the building is a tall radio transmission tower.
The building itself is a two-storey 10-by-10-bay timber frame structure faced in concrete with a flat roof. In the eastern section of the north (rear) elevation a nested pavilion three bays wide rises to an additional storey; an attached square brick chimney rises to its east. On the north and east are broad stone tiled sidewalks with shrubbery and decorative tree plantings enclosed by low stone walls on the latter. A parking lot roughly equal in area to the building is located on its west; to the south is an unnamed alley.
Fenestration on the facades facing the streets consists of casement windows with a large single pane over a smaller one. On the ground floor, the southernmost bay of the east face is set with a double window. Next to it is a projecting secondary entrance set with modern metal and glass doors sheltered by a flat concrete roof.
The last bay on the north end is blind, with the main entrance recessed into the corner and fronted by a low porch with metal railings. A single round metal pillar supports the upper story within the recess. Two projecting plain strips surround the entryway, with a similar quoin rising from the top. The bay to the west is blind as well.
A projecting course of flat strips similar to those in the quoins divides the second storey from the first. Like its counterpart below, the southernmost window on the east is doubled. This treatment is also accorded the third bay, above the secondary entrance, and the northernmost bay. The east facade has the single windows in all ten bays.