Orphaned Iowa City post office mural finds new home at City High

IOWA CITY - The mural created by former Iowa City resident Michael ‘Louie' Grant, which spent nearly three decades hanging in Iowa City's former post office has found a new home at City High.

John Bacon, City High principal, said a City High parent alerted him to the mural after reading about it in a news article and soon he was in touch with Grant, who Bacon said thought the idea of hanging the mural at Iowa City's oldest high school was a great idea.

'We got in contact with the artist and he was just thrilled with the idea,” Bacon said. 'I think the idea was just, it's a nice symbol of Iowa City, we thought it was a really neat piece of artwork and we have the space for it so we thought, ‘Why not?'”

The mural now hangs in the second-floor balcony lobby near the school's auditorium.

The four-piece mural - created in the former UI School of Art building along the Iowa River - was taken down in July following the Iowa City post office's move to a new, smaller location earlier this year.

Grant, a former Longfellow kid, West High student and UI graduate, painted and installed the mural in 1988.

Grant's mural, which is painted in black and white acrylic paint on four Masonite panels that span 32 feet in width, depicts an Iowa City landscape in four cross-sections - one of downtown, one of the GSA building, another focusing on the UI and the last a rural scene with sprawling fields.

The post office moved earlier this year out of the Federal Building, 400 S. Clinton St., and into a new home on southeast Iowa City's Pepperwood Plaza. USPS's lease at the Iowa City Federal Building - which cost the USPS $700,000 a year in rent - ended April 30 after the post office relocated to the smaller space at 925 Highway 6 E.

GSA officials are still working to secure a new tenant for the former post office space.

Upon finding out that the mural was painted by a graduate of City High's intercity rival, Bacon said he couldn't help but chuckle.

'I was not aware of that,” he said. 'That makes me smile a little bit, he's a product of the outstanding Iowa City Community School District.”

Grant could not be immediately reached for comment, but when the mural was going into storage in July, he expressed a strong desire to see it out before the public eye again.