Part of it may be the empire thing, but in the US even small town post offices from 1920 or earlier are luxurious by modern standards. We’d never ever spend wha

Part of it may be the empire thing, but in the US even small town post offices from 1920 or earlier are luxurious by modern standards. We’d never ever spend what it’d take to build them like that now. Small towns that didn’t have a town hall or courthouse or other civic buildings built by the 1930s or so tend to have government structures that look like (or are in!) strip malls. Or look like cheap funeral homes. We’re “way richer now” but all our nice buildings are from when we were “poor”. That even goes for commercial and industrial buildings. The stock of nice 5-15 story brick buildings that can be renovated into attractive apartments is basically fixed (actually, declining), because we don’t build anything that attractive and durable anymore. Similarly, it’s sometimes worrying how much of the very-nice infrastructure in our parks (state and national, both) was built by 1930s “New Deal” programs and hasn’t seen more than maintenance since. These are treasures we still enjoy today and we haven’t seriously invested in more of them in most of a century.