Featherston people are awaiting with interest attempts to demolish the old post office to make way for the new Trust House supermarket complex.
According to older town residents the post office was not only built to last, it was built basically strong enough to survive a nuclear blast.
The foreboding concrete edifice
is a child of the early 1950s and with both the 1942 earthquake and with atomic weapons having been used to lay waste to the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 bureaucrats were apparently determined to make public buildings extra strong.
Antiques dealer Campbell Moon, who bought the building from New Zealand Post and ran his business from it until selling out to Trust House, said the walls are reinforced with 2.5 cm diameter steel at 10cm centres, forming a grind that covers the entire building.
"As far as the strong room is concerned it was literally built with the object of it being able to survive a nuclear blast.
"Its foundations go down nearly two metres underground."
Mr Moon said during his tenure in the old post office he decided to lower the windows at the front, facing Fitzherbert Street..
"The builder said he could do the job in a day and he priced the job on that basis.
"Seven days later they were still at it.
"They expected to use up two, or at most three cutting blades, but it took eight to do the job"
Long time Featherston resident Pat Flynn said she was a young married woman when Fred Benton and his boys took on the job of building the then new post office.
"The old post office was across the road by the chemist shop and it crashed in the 1942 earthquake.
"I knew Mr Benton put plenty of steel and tonnes of concrete into the replacement, that's the way things were built those days."
Mrs Flynn said one thing was for sure - " the post office isn't going to be anything like the Fox Street toilets to wreck, they came down in a matter of minutes."
Trust House plans to construct a huge supermarket complex stretching from the existing Chungs building, now in Trust House ownership, to the Johnston Street corner.
