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The country’s oldest continuously operating custom house could soon close.
On Tuesday, New Bedford’s U.S. Custom House briefly appeared on a list of properties that the Trump administration plans to sell. But the list disappeared with no explanation on Wednesday, leaving the building’s status uncertain.
The historic building at 37 North Second St. once registered whaling ships and served as the city’s first post office when it opened in 1836. It currently provides office space for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and NOAA Fisheries.
The General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate, included the building in a list of more than 440 “non-core assets” slated to be sold. The list included 80 million square feet of property, mainly consisting of “empty and underutilized” office space, according to a GSA statement.
“Decades of funding deficiencies have resulted in many of these buildings becoming functionally obsolete and unsuitable for use by our federal workforce,” the GSA said. “We can no longer hope that funding will emerge to resolve these longstanding issues.”
Eight other Massachusetts properties appeared on the list, including Fall River’s Social Security building.
The list reportedly shrank to around 320 properties hours after it was released. By Wednesday morning, the list was replaced by a “coming soon” message on the GSA’s website.
In a written statement, New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell said he hopes the GSA will remove the building from the list.
“The U.S. Custom House is one of the most recognizable buildings in Downtown’s Historic District, and the federal workers perform important customs work to support the City’s role as a Foreign Trade Zone,” he said.
This is the second time in the last year-and-a-half that the GSA has announced plans to sell a New Bedford building.
In late 2023, the GSA shared its plan to close the downtown Hastings Keith federal building, which has offices for the Social Security Administration and NOAA. The agency didn’t publicly explain its reasoning at the time. Mitchell and the city’s congressional delegation blasted the plan in letters to the GSA last year.
The Hastings Keith building did not appear on the GSA list on Tuesday, but there is no other sign that plans for the building have changed. Mitchell said he discussed it in a meeting with U.S. Sen. Ed Markey while attending a mayors’ conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this year.
U.S. Rep. Bill Keating slammed the federal closures in a written statement to The Light.
“It simply makes no sense,” he said. “If we’ve learned anything since January 20th, it’s that this administration doesn’t care about the impacts of their decisions — they just care about cutting taxes for the rich at the expense of everyone else.”
Keating pointed out that if Fall River’s Social Security building and the Hastings Keith building both close, the South Coast will have no Social Security office. The closures would also leave New Bedford, a major worldwide fishing port, with no NOAA presence.
The representative said he would work with the area’s delegation to “make it clear to the Trump administration” that the federal government needs a physical presence in this area.
President Donald Trump has made it a priority to downsize the federal government. But the move to sell offices confused some federal employees because it came right after the administration ordered an end to remote work in the executive branch.
“Everybody comes back to the office, then it’s like, ‘Get out,’” said Jeff Pimentel, a consumer safety officer and the only employee in the Custom House’s second-floor NOAA Fisheries office on Wednesday afternoon. He said many employees in the office do their work in the field.
Pimentel referred questions to the NOAA Fisheries regional press office, which did not return The Light’s request for comment.
Other federal agencies have few answers about what’s happening.
The GSA’s press office did not respond to The Light’s questions about why the Custom House was added to the list and why the list disappeared less than a day later. The building’s manager, a Providence-based GSA employee, referred questions back to the unresponsive press office.
A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol employee in the New Bedford office referred questions to Public Affairs Officer Ryan Brissette. The spokesperson acknowledged The Light’s request for comment in an email on Wednesday afternoon but didn’t immediately have a full response.
A local and national landmark
The Custom House was quiet on Wednesday afternoon, but it wasn’t always that way.
“At the height of New Bedford’s whaling years, the number of ships registered and the number of seamen requesting their protection papers made the small building one of the busiest places in town,” according to informational signage posted inside the building.
When it opened in 1836, the building “served as an experiment” in what was then a new federal building program, the signage said. It illustrated a need for more buildings, the expense of constructing them, and the development of public planning procedures.
Robert Mills, known for designing the Washington Monument, was the architect. It was one of four small Greek Revival custom houses he designed for the federal government to be built in New England ports around the same time.
The building was deemed “functionally outdated” in 1958 and was “extensively restored” in 1962, according to the GSA. It was registered as a National Historic Landmark in 1971. Today, it sits inside the New Bedford National Historical Whaling Park.
Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org
I read a similar article in another newspaper yesterday about the Trump administration wanting to shut down Portland Maine’s Custom house; another beautiful building which represents some of our finest architecture and most historically significant public structures. Moreover, many of these buildings were made using granite which was sourced from regional quarry’s (Massachusetts and Vermont specifically) crafted by Irish, Italian and Portegese immigrants (and therein may lie Trump’s disdain for them). If there is one thing Trump has little knowledge of much less respect and empathy for it is history. He would just as soon take a wrecking ball to anyone and anything he had no hand in creating. I hope that if New Bedford’s Custom House does end up on the proverbial chopping block list, it can be purchased either by the city itself or a group which has the wherewithal to maintain and use it for just purposes into perpetuity. Trump’s entire term and makeup is a personification of eminent domain over everyone and everything with exception of those select few who are in his deranged and highly dysfunctional club called “Dumbminster”.
Here, here, I could not have said it better myself.
It’s a beautiful building with historical value. It has character, unlike some of the newer buildings. If it is sold, the buyer should agree to keep it as is. The older buildings give the city charm and interest.
Great commercial property.