To Blaze in Glory

Internal Revenue Office Interior Will Match Water Cooler

They are painting the Internal Revenue offices in the United States building on South Main street, and all the neighbors wonder. It's a great event. No one can remember when they have been painted before, and as for the paper, it was made at the time Jackson was having his fight with the State Banks under the advice of his kitchen cabinet. So you see the renovation is not such a small thing as might be imagined.

It all came from the water cooler. Last summer the Treasury Department with a recklessness unparalleled, placed a new water cooler in the office. To be sure, the requisitions for it had been in about three years, the request being renewed each summer, but then no one had expected any greater success this year than had attended the other efforts. The old cooler was very useful as an example of ancient architecture and could be used for several other things than holding water. Ice melted in that as well as anywhere else, and the deputies had a new pastime, of speculating on their chances of finding water in it before they went to drink. But at last they got a new cooler.

That was the beginning of a riotous career of extravagance and renovation. The glories of that cooler, with its red and blue and no one knows what other color paint, and its picture of the Maine on the front, shone forth resplendent against a dingy background. The carpet looked shabby after that, although the deputies, with jealous care, hid the cooler in a closet where none might see it and be stricken with its charms.

The carpet had to go, and a new one came in its place. That made the walls look dirty, and another requisition for 10 cents worth of paint and some rolls of wall paper, with a man to put them up, was made. An inspector came, looked at the walls, looked at the carpet and was then taken in the closet and given a drink from the cooler. That settled it. The observation through the bottom of the glass of ice water turned the scale, and the recommendation was favorable.

Tuesday the painters came and touched up the ceiling. Then they began on the woodwork and now all is linseed oil in the office, smothering the smell of the cigars brought in by customers who have fell designs on the welfare of the deputies. Some new and handsome wall paper is going up, and the deputes are fleeing from the place and working anywhere, writing letters against the wall and finding every minute of the day that their most important letters and papers are still in the desks over which the painters and the paper hangers are working.

But it cannot last forever, and then the joy of it when it is done! The deputies expect to have a coming-out party at that festive period. Meanwhile, they are casting glances of scorn at the rooms downstairs. These are being whitewashed or something, but they are not to be compared with the scene of splendor in the upper story. Nothing can be compared with that. It is like the whiskers of a Populist. Incomparable.

Note: We linked to the Wikipedia article about Providence's U.S. Customshouse, despite the fact that it's not located on South Main Street, and was built in 1855-57, a couple of decades after Andrew Jackson's Bank War. The building otherwise fulfills the criteria for the named "United States building," in that the Internal Revenue Service maintained offices there from its opening through to the opening of the new Federal Building in Exchange Place in 1909.

"whiskers of a Populist" may refer specifically to the impressive facial shrubbery of William A. Peffer, a Populist politician from Kansas who served in the U.S. Senate from 1891-'97.