File:U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, Canandaigua, New York - 20210610.jpg

English: U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, 28 North Main Street, Canandaigua, New York, June 2021. One of a surprisingly small number of buildings in the Canandaigua Historic District erected in the 20th century, here the Boston architectural firm of Allen & Collens swap out their favored Gothic Revival style for a stolid Neoclassical design whose popularity in the domain of American civic and institutional buildings endured throughout the first century and a half of the nation's existence. Here we see an elegant tetrastyle Doric portico with fluted columns looming over a low entrance stairway, with the words UNITED STATES POST OFFICE AND COURT HOUSE in the frieze flanked by an alternating pattern of triglyphs and metopes containing simple circular reliefs. Above is a parapet where the date of the building's construction - 1910 (A.D. MCMX) - is flanked with reliefs of shields, scrolls and shells. The third floor, designed by government-employed architect Louis Simon, was added in 1930. The building derives historic notability from the fact that - very unusually for federal government buildings - it was financed, designed, and built on land donated by private interests. The Tarsney Act of 1893 afforded benefactress Mary Clark Thompson - the daughter of former New York governor Myron Holley Clark and widow of prominent banker Frederick Ferris Thompson - broad latitude in choosing the location, architect, and site plan herself. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988 (in its own right; as mentioned before, it also became a contributing property to the Canandaigua Historic District upon the expansion of its boundaries in 2016), and three years later the post office vacated it in favor of a larger facility on the east side of town. The building was purchased by the YMCA in 1994, whose original home was next door and in need of expansion.