I visited as many as 39 post offices in one day. State by state, counting only new, distinct active postal locations (including CPUs) for the year:
Pennsylvania: 74 post offices
Focus/Foci: Rural corners of northern PA
Ohio: 46
North-central Ohio and Cleveland suburbs
Connecticut: 38
Northeast and south-central CT
New York: 21
Southern Tier
In addition to these I also visited discontinued / suspended post offices for documentation purposes as well as historic former post office buildings.
Among privately-operated Contract Postal Units was the operation at the student center at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio:
Kent, OH: Kent State University CPU:
Former sites visited this year include the grand old post office of Hornell, New York, which celebrates its centennial in 2016. Well, I suppose it would be celebrated were the structure not presently relegated to the municipal equivalent of a paperweight.
Hornell, NY: former post office:
There had been a post office in Barton, New York until it was washed away by flooding caused by Hurricane Irene in 2011 and never replaced. It was around here somewhere:
Barton, NY:
Despite some yearning for what we've lost I did find several wonderfully photogenic post offices this year, including that in Milan, Pennsylvania, made all the more stunning during the peak of an August sunset:
Milan, Pennsylvania post office:
Count-wise, I reached a modest milestone this year. My 6,500th post office was New Riegel, Ohio.
New Riegel, OH post office:
See y'all next year! Well, this year. Had a bit of a late start on this post, I suppose.
Does your count not include contract-operated stations and branches? In which case your count would be somewhat higher.
ReplyDeleteAnything we'd include in our directories I include toward the total count!
ReplyDeleteWilliam McAdoo was from my hometown of Marietta, GA. I have never seen his name on the cornerstone of a post office, so seeing your shot of the Hornell, NY post office is a real treat for me.
ReplyDeleteI always look forward to the added post office posts, and in this group, love Hornell design, but that Milan office definitely has something unique going for it. They closed our campus post office this past year as well.
ReplyDeleteThe PMCC, your blog, and the efforts you and the "team" have made toward documenting the enduring legacy of the USPS in the US, the only agency specifically identified by the Constitution, now over 200 years old, may, in addition to its value as a historical record, be more important than citizens fully realize. There are powerful forces in Congress whose goal is the eventual "privatization" of the USPS where the contracts to provide postal services would be awarded to "private" vendors, corporate supporters and donors. Approximately 600,000 well-paying, unionized jobs with benefits would be eliminated and replaced with workers to be paid whatever owners decide, out of government oversight and job descriptions. The pre-funded pension requirement, enacted during the George W. Bush administration was a major opening volley in this battle.
ReplyDelete