POST OFFICE NO MORE: The Triumph Brewing Company, relocated to the former post office building on Palmer Square, will be reopening this weekend after years of planning, renovation, and reconstruction. The main entrance is located where the post office loading dock used to be, on the opposite side of the building from the old post office entrance. (Photo by Anthony Stull Photography)

By Donald Gilpin

The former post office on Palmer Square is ready for its long-awaited rebirth as the Triumph Brewing Company, with reopening scheduled for this weekend, according to Triumph representative Eric Nutt.

It’s been a difficult birthing process since a plan for renovating the old post office was first presented to the Princeton Planning Board in 2017, but Nutt urges the hungry, thirsty, and/or curious to watch the triumphbrewing.com website for details about the reopening. It could be this Friday, he hinted, but certainly by the last day of the month on Sunday.

“It won’t be a huge grand opening,” he said. “It’s a soft opening. We’ll build gradually, organically. It will be nice to have a full-service restaurant and brewery back open in Princeton. We’re anxious to get back open.”

In a phone conversation on Monday afternoon, Kevin Wilkes, managing partner of Princeton Design Guild, one of four architecture firms involved in the project, announced, “We have our final certification of occupancy issued by the Municipality of Princeton.”

He continued, “The Triumph organization is busy training staff this very moment.” He noted that hiring had been a challenge, and there’s still a “Now Hiring” notice on the website, seeking applications online for all hourly positions.

“It did take many months for them to solicit applications, hold interviews, and make selections,” he said, but most of the positions are now filled.

Wilkes noted, however, that the operations side of the business is not part of his job description. “My primary responsibility is to turn the post office into a brewery and restaurant,” he said, and that has been a matter not of months, but years.

Originally constructed in 1934, the Palmer Square post office was targeted for closing in 2013. The post office was relocated to a smaller location behind the 7-11 on eastern Nassau Street in 2015, and the Palmer Square building was sold to a private developer.

The process, since approval by the Planning Board in 2017, has been challenging, according to Wilkes. “We had to go through state approval of the historic preservation plan, state approval of the
building permits,” he said. “Then we had 41 straight months of construction.”

The entire building was gutted, and refurbished to accommodate the restaurant’s dining rooms, bars, and brewery equipment.

Neither Wilkes nor Nutt would comment on the total budget for the project, but they both acknowledged, “You would be correct if you said it was a multimillion dollar project.”

About 20 percent of the building has been restored and about 80 percent completely reconstructed to fit the new needs of a restaurant and brewery. The restored portion, according to Wilkes, is the entire outside of the building except for the old post office loading dock that faced east. That loading dock, that used to be the back of the post office, has become a new front entrance pavilion.
“You’ll actually enter the building from the east instead of as previously done from the Palmer Square Green on the west,” said Wilkes.

One other area that has been restored is the entire lobby “that everyone remembers when they went inside to mail their letters or their parcel post,” he said. “That entire room has been restored to its original glory.”

A historic WPA mural painted in 1939 in the lobby is still owned by the federal government and on loan from the U.S. Postal Service. Triumph performed extensive restorations, and the mural is now illuminated with special lighting.

Wilkes described the mural as “centrally themed around Nassau Hall and the early founding of Princeton University,” with depictions of James Madison, 1771 Princeton University graduate and poet Phillip Freneau, and Revolutionary War officer “Light-Horse Harry” Lee.

Perhaps even more popular and appealing than the renovated post office lobby, Wilkes suggested, might be the cocktail lounge at the center of the building, “a remarkable, uplifting space that is even more wonderful than the lobby that we all first knew.”

The building is also designed with the ability to be partitioned off, so that individual events can be staged in any one of five different spaces in the building. “The building has two gorgeous bars and two beautiful dining rooms,” Wilkes added.

Nutt described the restaurant as “a unique experience on two levels.” He continued, “There’s the entrée-heavy dining experience in the upstairs and the pub-friendly sandwich space with music downstairs. Come and see which space works best for you or on which particular evening you prefer which space.”

Nutt said that the highlight of the project for him was “seeing the transformation of the space and envisioning how it would turn out, making improvements along the way and doing it all in a thoughtful, caring way.” He commented in particular on Wilkes’ “craftsmanship in custom woodworking and design work, proceeding with great thoughtfulness and attention to detail.”

Graduate Hotel

The Princeton Graduate Hotel, another massive building project, this one at the corner of Nassau and Chambers streets just two blocks from the new Triumph Brewery, has also taken longer than anticipated to complete, and the opening, originally scheduled for December 2023, continues to be delayed.

Graduate Hotels management did not respond to repeated requests for information, but the 180-room hotel is taking reservations online for July 29 and afterwards.

One of 33 Graduate Hotels in the U.S. and England, mostly in college towns, the new Princeton hotel strikes a distinctively Princeton University-based theme, as seen in renderings and a peek through the windows on Chambers Street, where the main entrance will be. There are tall, elegant wooden bookcases, framed class jackets, ornamental tigers, and a strong orange and black motif, as described in a Princeton Alumni Weekly article. The article also notes that construction of the new hotel has cost more than $100 million.