The 2021 Calendar of Post Offices and Places

[Edit, March 2021: the calendar has been removed from public sale.]

Hello, everyone! It's looking more and more likely that there will be a 2021 next year. To help celebrate, I am pleased to introduce the fifth annual Postlandia Calendar of Post Offices and Places! When I first started creating these back in 2016, I'd just completed my goal of visiting all 50 states by the age of 30. Since then I've reached 10,000 post offices photographed across the country, and this Thanksgiving I'd like thank everyone who has followed my travels, viewed my photographs, read my stories, and supported my mission by purchasing these calendars #ThanksForTheGasMoney.

The Postlandia calendar once again takes you across thousands of miles, celebrating 12 new photogenic and historic post offices from all across America. This year's batch takes you from the Caribbean to New England, down to the heart of Texas, and out to the rural West. Some of the offices are ridiculously historic, and a few have been thoughtfully repurposed. There are a couple of Depression-era Deco beauties, and one post office that dates back to 1816.

Each office is captioned, beneath a high-resolution image (much greater than what I present here) printed on thick, lustrous 100-pound paper that can stand up to your pens and Sharpies with ease.

[Link removed, March 2021:] Here is the direct link to the calendar on Lulu, my trusty printer.

The dates feature not just U.S. and religious holidays, but dates significant to American postal history. Because, why not? Learning is cool! Ever wanted to know when the first U.S. Airmail flight took place, or when the National Postal Museum opened? Find those dates, and more, inside.

2021 Postlandia Calendar Cover:


The cover (and one of the months) features one of the coolest post offices in the country: Hinsdale, New Hampshire, which has been housed in this very building since 1816. I couldn't believe my luck upon my visit several years back, when the setting sun hit the building at just the right angle, perfectly amplifying the building's warm hues. Here's a bit more of what's in store:

North Carolina: Deco Classic


Connecticut: Dining in Style


Michigan: Drive-Up Only


If, like me, you've been largely stuck at home this year and missing the world beyond, I hope this brings you some vicarious joy from the open road.

I've always said that this is the perfect gift for the special USPS employee or snail mail enthusiast in your life; a wonderful purchase for philatelist and stamp collectors; and generally speaking, just the perfect post office calendar. Again, the calendar is available [link removed], at the secure website of the high-quality printer Lulu. Everyone I know who's purchased the 2017, 2018, 2019, and/or 2020 Postlandia calendar has enjoyed it.

Postlandia accepts no advertising, because I hate ads. Selling calendars is how I recover a modicum of money doing what I love to do. You can also reach out to me directly if you'd be interested in donating. And of coure, find Postlandia on Facebook and Instagram!

Thank you!
Evan

2017 Postal Summary

Wow, I've been at this a while now. This blog has been around since 2010, and every year I've posted a year-end summary of all the post offices I've visited that year. So, welcome to our eighth annual summary!

(As always, my prior summaries can be found at these links: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. Okay, down to business!)

2017 was my most productive year in quite some time. I visited a hearty 1,261 new, active postal operations this year, the most of any year save 2012 (wherein I took a 17,000-mile, 1,400+ P.O. road trip that spanned 3.5 months). My grand total is now 8,722 post offices.

This year's travels included a two-week venture into New Hampshire, Vermont, and far Upstate New York; a 3,200-mile trek from the Bay Area to remote communities in the high Nevada desert; and a 6,000-mile, 641-post office road trip through the Upper Midwest, featuring Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

This year I had the pleasure of teaming up with Postlandia friend John Gallagher for a weekend of trekking through the northern Nevada desert, home to many of the most remote post offices in the mainland U.S. (For one thing, it pays to split the fuel costs out there!) I nabbed a couple of relaxing ferry rides to island post offices in the Great Lakes: La Pointe, Wisconsin, and Mackinac Island, Michigan.

And here's a quick note to the dozens of people who purchased the 2018 Postlandia calendar, and/or postcards! Your support is always greatly appreciated. This has always been a passion project, and I don't get paid a dime to do any of this.

Postlandia also has a new Instagram feed!

As always, the counts in this post include active 'standard' post offices, Contract Postal Units (CPUs), carrier annexes, and mail processing plants. They do not include former sites (e.g. historic post office buildings), places I've previously been to but revisited (say, to take a better photo), or previously discontinued operations.

San Francisco Network Distribution Center [NDC] in Richmond, CA


I visited a bewildering 40 Meijer [CPU] locations, across four Upper Midwestern states, including:


Springfield, IL: former post office


Fridley, MN: Carrier Annex


Earlier this year I documented the first-day WPA Posters stamp ceremony in Hyde Park, New York, and met Megan Brennan (again, though for the first time as Postmaster General):

2017 By the Numbers

I visited as many as 34 post offices in one day this year. State by state:

New York: 212 post offices
Focus/Foci: Far northern tier; northeast New York; Seneca Falls region; I-81 southeast of Syracuse

Michigan: 177 post offices
Most of the Upper Peninsula; Traverse City to Lansing; Battle Creek

California: 134 post offices
San Francisco; Oakland and East Bay; I-80 corridor to Lake Tahoe

Indiana: 101 post offices
Indianapolis area up to Lafayette region; Fort Wayne to South Bend

Vermont: 91 post offices
Northeast Kingdom; Montpelier region; Burlington region

Pennsylvania: 72 post offices
Southwest PA (Washington region); northwest PA (south of Erie)

Ohio: 72 post offices
I-70 corridor, including Columbus and Dayton; Cleveland area

Minnesota: 62 post offices
Eastern tiers: Mississippi north to the Twin Cities, and MSP area to Duluth

Massachusetts: 60 post offices
Plymouth County; NW Boston suburbs

Wisconsin: 57 post offices
Southwest WI, La Crosse area; far northern WI

Nevada: 56 post offices
Most of the northern half of Nevada, including Reno/Sparks

Illinois: 55 post offices
Champaign-Urbana, Springfield, Decatur areas

Maine: 40 post offices
Southwest Maine, NW of Portland

New Hampshire: 24 post offices
Northern New Hampshire

Connecticut: 21 post offices
All remaining post offices, primarily NW of Hartford

Iowa: 14 post offices
Quad Cities area; Dubuque

Rhode Island: 7 post offices
All remaining [publicly accessible] post offices -- Newport area

West Virginia: 6 post offices
Wheeling

Here's the Elm Grove Station in Wheeling:

Milestones

8,000th post office: Hayward, CA: Bradford Station

This spring I finished visiting all publicly accessible post offices in the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island...

Goshen, CT:


Tiverton, RI:


Early this year I visited my 1,000th post office in New York State:

Actually completing Connecticut:

Earlier this month WNPR's Colin McEnroe Show (listen to the full episode here) invited me to speak about some post offices across Connecticut and the U.S., and I mentioned for the sake of accuracy that I'd visited all *publicly accessible* post offices in Connecticut, although I had not been able to visit the operation located on the Naval Submarine Base New London, in Groton. Thanks to a very generous listener, and U.S. Navy officers and officials at base, this week I was given a tour of the facility and allowed to complete my Connecticut postal collection. (The experience is worthy of a post unto itself.) Thank you all!!!

Here I am with the U.S. Post Office and military post office staff, in front of the post office:



Counting Counties:
I visited 95 new counties in 2017. They are shown in brown on this travel map:



Dear readers, thank you for your continued support! I'm looking forward to a great year of new post office photos and stories to share with you in 2018.

The 2018 Calendar of Post Offices and Places

Please check the newest entries in this blog for the most current link to the most current Postlandia calendar! ---- It's that time of the year again—that time I somewhat shamelessly inform you of the amazing and fantastic new Postlandia Calendar of Post Offices and Places! This year's [the 2018] iteration features 12 all-new and unique images, from a dozen different states. And these are really good ones!


Cover snippet

With Postlandia I've always brought you the stories behind the post offices and communities of America, and here you can explore a wide-ranging cross-section of the nation. This year's offerings transport you across the United States: Alaska, the South, New England, the Upper Midwest, California, and the vast and empty West. These photos take you not just from time zone to time zone, but span history as you explore photos from two centuries (taken from 1900 to the present).

Where can you find a literal 'floating post office' that rises with the tides? How about a vintage Vermont general store (and post office, of course) that appears today just as it did 100 years ago? The calendar also features the 1910 New Ulm, Minnesota post office, which was so distinctive that its construction essentially forced the government to re-write its design standards. And then there's the post office on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, and I guarantee it will floor you. (This particular location took me an hour and a half to find as I drove through the high desert this summer; for you it will have definitely been worth the wait.) And there's more. Much more. As always, here you don't just get photos, you get the story behind what makes them unique.

All images in the calendar are full-page and high quality. And, with each photo, there's full text at the bottom that explains exactly what's going on. Here are peeks at just a few of the images (which have been cropped to show detail on your screen)!

Minnesota: there's no place like New Ulm


Montana: last looks at a ghost town P.O.


Vintage Vermont


Again, there's so much more where these came from. I hope you experience as much enjoyment with this calendar next year as I enjoyed piecing it all together this summer. Remember, I've trekked to thousands of post offices—across all 50 states—to document as many post offices as I can, so I bring you some of the very best, anywhere.

I really do believe this is the perfect calendar for USPS employees, a great gift for the mail carrier in your life, a perfect purchase for philatelist and stamp collectors, and generally speaking, just the perfect post office calendar. The calendar is available [Nov. 2018 edit: link removed], at the website of a high-quality printer called Lulu. The calendar even has the honor of being on the printer's Holiday Gift Guide! Again, you can find it here, and everyone I know who's purchased either the 2017 or 2018 Postlandia post office calendar has loved it.

Thanks, Lulu!

The Flooded Post Office in the Desert: Montello, Nevada

You might be familiar with the years-long drought in California that ended this winter. The wettest winter in more than a century resulted in record snow melt, breaches in dams and emergency spillways (notably Oroville in northern California), the closure of stretches of Highway 1 along the California coast near Big Sur, and the flooding of a post office northwest of Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, in far northeast Nevada. I first read about an emergency mobile postal unit heading to the high desert back in February, soon after failure of the Twentyone Mile Dam.

Here's Utah station KSL coverage of the damn burst, to give you a sense of the magnitude of the situation.



Waters easily poured the 25 miles southeast to Montello, flooding basements and, according to USPS, "swamping" the post office. Photo here of the post office at the time. No mail was damaged, and USPS sent over a Mobile Unit to maintain operations in the community (as opposed to subjecting residents to a nearly 100-mile-round trip to West Wendover—or '150 miles,' as per a veterans group protesting the potential closure of the Montello post office several years back). The road at the Nevada/Utah border, 11 miles northeast, was also washed out.

Here's a look at the landscape as of the beginning of July, and here is the Montello post office.





When Postlandia friend John and I arrived in Montello about a month ago the mobile unit was still on the scene, camped out at the south side of the post office building. There was not apparent damage inside the post office; in fact it seemed ready to reopen. The building smelled of fresh paint, and several fixtures, including the windows, seemed newly installed. The standard facility has been in use since 1997 (per dedication plaque). I've been told the building was inspected to ensure there was no structural damage or threat of mold, which led to the suspension of quite a few postal operations over the years.

USPS Mobile Unit in Montello:



Fresh paint and window repair work at the Montello P.O.





Nice touch: A modest display on the bulletin board shows a couple of photos of the former Montello post office and its former postmasters. It's an all-in-the-family story: Melva Pearson served from July 1950 to October 1976; Ruth Pearson [surname Beatty, as of July 1993] took over until June 1996; then Josephine Pearson served as Postmaster until April 2015.



While preparing this post I looked into the photo topped by the heading Ruralite, a monthly magazine founded by northwestern electric cooperatives in the 1950s. The publication features information "about electrical safety, conservation, and new products or ways of doing things," and issues regional variants. Several editions have featured fantastic vignettes about small-town post offices and Postmasters, including Montello in 1987. Ruralite was kind enough to find the publication in its archives and send it over. Written by Rick and Kristi Steber, the story was written when the Montello post office occupied a false-fronted building on Route 233 between 3rd and 4th Streets. Image from Google Street View, 2008:



The building, possibly built as a cabin for use by the manager of a cattle company and in use as a post office since prior to 1956, was repainted between 1987 and 2008. Once the post office moved out, signage that had read "U.S. POST OFFICE // MONTELLO NEV. // 89830" became "MONTELLO NV", albeit the new iteration retained the font's basic character. 1987 photo (courtesy Ruralite):



The Ruralite story details a typical day in the life of the Montello post office at the time. Postmaster Ruth would arrive at 7:30 a.m. by bicycle, have her morning smoke and coffee, and sell stamps and money orders until the day's mail was delivered from Wells, Nevada (another town approximately 50 miles away). After delivering the mail to the 100 or so P.O. Boxes the Montello post office serves, Ruth said, "sometime during the day everyone in town will swing by to pickup their mail. It is fun to see people."

Her attitude is one we can all appreciate. "I found out a long time ago if you are friendly people will be friendly to you. It works the same if you are a crab. Most days, I'm smiling."



The day wound down, per Ruralite, at the 2:30 mail dispatch. In those days mail would have been processed in Elko, northeast Nevada's largest city (present population 20,000), 100 miles away. Today, Montello's mail travels much further; a few years back Elko mail processing operations were moved to Salt Lake City—a 227-mile drive (further than the distance between New York City and Boston)—as part of USPS's Area Mail Processing initiative.

Montello's present operating hours are weekdays, 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. with a half-hour lunch break at noon, and Saturday from 9 to 11 a.m.

There are plenty more stories from northern Nevada post offices to tell; see you next time!

An Interesting Alternative: Post Office Express

USPS is keen on expanding its Alternative Access options no matter what, with the ultimate plan of reducing its full-time staff and brick-and-mortar infrastructure. The best Alternative Access channel USPS has is a CPU, though other options include VPOs, Office Max things, Approved Shippers, and partners (read: every large retailer) that sell stamps on consignment.

One alternative that splits the difference between diminished infrastructure and reductions in staff are Post Office Express (POE) operations, whereupon a USPS-staffed finance unit takes residence in a large supermarket operation. The store gets increased foot traffic and the Postal Service gets a prime location in a well-visited location. The option never really took hold and there are but a few of these operations in the country. The only active operations lie in the Las Vegas area and Albuquerque. This post focuses on the former.

The program was conceived and introduced by USPS Headquarters in the mid-1990s, with most POE operations opening for business in 1995 and 1996. In Las Vegas the program served to mitigate the loss of two large Contract Postal Unit contracts: a set of Hallmark franchises and Smith's Food & Drug.

The original Post Office Express locations in Las Vegas, of which there were about a dozen, appeared in Lucky Stores, a local chain of supermarkets. The chain underwent two buyouts and its operations since became Albertson's supermarkets. Several POE operations have since closed during store relocation or renovations; four POE operations in the area, all in Albertson's supermarkets, remain.

According to the fourth edition of the PMCC Post Office Directory for Nevada, there were eight POE locations in the Vegas area as of October 2005; one closed earlier that year. Address information regarding the old Lucky's POE locations bleeds through by way of the Payphone Project's collection box database for Las Vegas, which claims to have last been updated during 2007. Here are the locations that are not active today:

4420 East Bonanza Rd., 89110: "POST OFFICE EXPRESS"
6140 West Lake Mead Blvd., 89108: "POST OFFICE EXPRESS"
4801 Spring Mountain Rd., 89102: "IN FRONT OF LUCKY'S POE (INSIDE)"
2300 East Tropicana Ave., 89119: "POST OFFICE EXPRESS"

The author has visited the four active Post Office Express operations in Las Vegas, and anyone can find out more information about the facilities using USPS's Leased Facilities Report. The best part is that for these operations USPS pays nothing in rent. Okay, sometimes it pays $1 a year. Building maintenance is handled by the landlord, not by USPS itself.

Below is a photo of one such operation, POE #683 (a.k.a. Warm Springs POE). You'll observe that the postal space can be fully closed off from the rest of the store using a sliding / accordion metal barricade. A blue collection box rests outside the door. An exterior photo of the Albertson's is also shown; three of the four operations are signed by USPS Sonic Eagle logos outside.

Las Vegas: POE #683:



Here are the data for active POEs from the Nevada Leased Facilities Report:

Henderson, NV: Horizon Ridge POE (POE Henderson); 2650 W Horizon Ridge Pkwy., 89052.
    1,100 sq. ft., $0.00 rent.
Las Vegas, NV: West Cheyenne POE (POE #695); 8350 W Cheyenne Ave., 89129.
    570 sq. ft., $1.00 rent.
Las Vegas, NV: West Flamingo POE; 10140 W Flamingo Rd., 89147.
    923 sq. ft., $0.00 rent.
Las Vegas, NV: Warm Springs POE (POE #683); 7271 S Eastern Ave., 89119.
    751 sq. ft., $1.00 rent.

(USPS also leases a 110-square-foot APC-only site at another Albertson's location for $1.00 per year.)

By contrast, Las Vegas's Airport Retail Unit occupies 1,056 square feet with a rent of $21,360. Most leased facilities in the Las Vegas area are leased for $15 to $21 per square foot. Freedom of Information Act requests are fun.

The primary costs of operation for Post Office Express locations lay with staffing, and there are two concerns in this regard: 1) the hours of operation are long and (in three cases) continuous, a situation which calls for multiple employees. 2) Customer traffic fluctuates throughout the day. At the West Flamingo Post Office Express operation, the line was out the door at opening time. At POE #683, southeast of McCarran, I arrived after 5 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, and I was definitely the only patron. At post offices with full carrier operations, there is other work a clerk could do during customer traffic lulls; not so at POE locations.

The hours of operation for Las Vegas-area POEs are extensive, and in two instances they are even open Sundays:
POE #683 and #695:
    Mon.-Fri.: 10:30am—7:00pm
    Sat.-Sun.: 11:00am—7:00pm

POE Flamingo:
    Mon.-Fri.: 11:00am—3:30pm, 4:30pm—7:00pm [6:30 on Friday]
    [Closed Sat. and Sun.]

POE Henderson:
    Mon.-Sat.: 11:00am—7:00pm
    [Closed Sunday]

Now, here are some photos!

POE Henderson:


POE #695:



The newest Post Office Express location, POE Flamingo, also houses an Automated Postal Center:



Albuquerque's three Post Office Express locations are not free of rent; in fact, the locations (at Smith's Food & Drug stores; sound familiar?) are rented for about $29 per square foot, about $21,000 to $34,000 per year.

Carson City, NV also housed a Post Office Express location by way of a Super Kmart Center store (at 3456 N. Carson St.) that was discontinued May 2003. (The POE closed Feb. 23, 2003.) One old Geocities page documents this fact. (Ah, GeoCities. Remember those days?) Declared "the busiest K-Mart Store [storewanderer] had ever seen," the location "had no other competition on its side of town other than an Albertsons and a Safeway." The store advertised its POE on its large exterior signage. The POE, storewanderer declared, "was another thing lost by North Carson upon closure of this store."

The L.A. Times noted in 1995 that this was not the only Kmart to maintain a Post Office Express; "In Fresno, Carson City and Lincoln Park near Detroit, full-service post offices are inside Super Kmart stores. Called "Post Office Express," they are open whenever the store is open, seven days a week. More will open soon in Nashville supermarkets."

It should be noted that not all locations possessing "Post Office Express" signage are a USPS-staffed locations. Occasionally such is used at a standard Contract Postal Unit, as with the Student Unit operation at UCLA. (See photo here.)

USPS's Inaccurate Annual Compliance Data: CPUs

The U.S. Postal Service provides to the Postal Regulatory Commission data regarding all parts of its operations. While there are lots of fascinating tidbits all around, my primary interest as the 'postal tourist' involves information regarding USPS's physical infrastructure. To me this includes Post Offices, classified stations and branches, carrier annexes, and mail processing facilities. I also track contract postal units (CPUs) which, even though they are not staffed by postal employees, are the closest "Alternative Access" channel USPS possesses to formal post offices. CPUs, ideally, supplement USPS's 'formal' network. Tracking them enables greater understanding of access to postal services in a community, and so it is important that accurate information be made available to the public for further analysis.

A PRC Chairman's Information Request requested that USPS provide a list of post offices suspensions, offices formally closed, data regarding all collection boxes in the country(!), identification of all Contract Postal Units (including CPOs, a subset of CPU), and identification of all active Village Post Offices. On January 17, 2013 USPS responded to each of these requests.

This is the Chairman's request (see link above):

Please provide an Excel spreadsheet including Office Name (or other appropriate identifier), Unit Type (Community Post Office (CPO) or Contract Postal Unit (CPU)), Location (City and State), and 5-digit ZIP Code for the following:
a. CPUs and CPOs in existence at the beginning of FY 2012;
b. CPUs and CPOs newly established in FY 2012;
c. CPUs and CPOs closed in FY 2012; and
d. CPUs and CPOs in existence at the end of FY 2012.

USPS responded [see page 4]:
Please see USPS Library Reference USPS-LR-FY12-45, ChIR2.3.xls.

The author has, and he concludes that the data provided by the U.S. Postal Service to the Postal Regulatory Commission regarding CPUs is incomplete and inaccurate. How do I know? Because I've visited locations around the country during FY 2012 that are completely unaccounted for by the response documentation provided.

Save The Post Office analyzed the overall data, and concluded that a net of 500 Contract Postal Units closed during FY 2012, leading to a nearly 15% reduction in contract operations. I do not believe this assessment to be correct. Rather, I'm convinced that the data provided by USPS are incomplete and otherwise misleading.

The U.S. Postal Service, in replying to a similar request for its fiscal year 2011, responded with an Excel file with three sheets: "Closed FY 2011", "Opened FY 2011", and "Open_End FY 2011". There is no reason it should not be able to create a nearly identical product for 2012. Heck, the response to "List the CPUs open at the beginning of FY 2012" should be just about identical to the "List the CPUs open at the end of FY 2011," right? Instead, USPS has responded with a one-sheet Excel file that addresses none of the questions at hand.

Las Vegas

In analyzing a 3,000-row spreadsheet it helps to check a region of entries against information you know. I found it helpful to sort the data first by state, and then by ZIP code. My first test region is the Las Vegas metropolitan area, an area in which I spent five nights and visited every active classified and contract postal operation last spring. I've made a photographic map of all these operations available. There were 21 CPUs in operation within the Las Vegas metro area (which, here, includes Las Vegas, Henderson, and North Las Vegas) at the beginning of May 2012.

(A screenshot of the map:)


My first observation about the Postal Service data (which is easier to see if you sort the spreadsheet by ZIP code) is that there are 12 duplicate entries: There are 11 gas stations in the region that were previously known as City Stop, each of which possessed a CPU. The chain was bought out by 7-11, and it's likely the CPUs have been converted to that name. In the USPS list, each operation is thus listed twice: once as a City Stop and once as a 7-11. You'll observe that the 7-11 operations occupy sequential contract numbers: 15597 to 15607. This is because they were converted at the same time. In any case, the entries:

11452 CITY STOP #7 CPU LAS VEGAS NV 89131
15606 7-11 #39599 CPU LAS VEGAS NV 89131
are the same, as are:

11468 CITY STOP #5 CPU LAS VEGAS NV 89144
15604 7-11 #39600 CPU LAS VEGAS NV 89144

... and so forth.

Another duplicate, listed with two different contract numbers, involves the Greenland Market CPU of 89146, a contract unit located at the front a large Korean supermarket. There is only one Greenland Market.

Accounting for these duplicates, USPS has accounted for 18 of the 21 CPUs within the region. Missing are:

• Mini Mart and Smoke Shop CPU: 89147
• Sun Drugs CPU: 89101; active for 35 years(?)
• Thunderbird Mail Center CPU: 89115; active for at least 15 years

All of these operations -- including, yes, all 11 then-City Stops -- have been mapped and pictured at the map link provided above, and were visited and photographed during FY 2012. And yes, all 21 were listed in the 2011 report.

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Tulsa is the parent post office of four CPUs: the East Central Mail Center CPU (74128); American Heritage Bank CPU (74132); U.S.A. Mail Center CPU (74133); and Pryority Mail CPU (74133). As a matter of fact, the latter is among the highest-grossing CPU in the entire U.S. (In some years it is the top-grossing CPU.) Yet it is not listed among the contract units active during FY 2012. Here's a photo, taken during a lull in the otherwise constant stream of customers:



The U.S.A. Mail Center CPU is a critical operation as it effectively serves as the retail unit for the Chimney Hills Carrier Annex next door. Yet it's not listed either.

Interestingly enough, the U.S.A. Mail Center CPU and American Heritage CPU had their ZIP codes mis-listed in USPS's 2011 CPU listings.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

The largest city in one of the nation's least-populous states is rather remarkable in that it possesses, besides its main post office, one classified station and 14 CPUs. They are designated numbered stations 1 through 14. Thirteen CPUs are locations of two regional chains: Lewis Drug's and Hy-Vee. There are six of the former and seven of the latter, respectively. USPS's 2012 CPU Directory only accounts for six Hy-Vee locations, however.

Sioux Falls, SD: HyVee CPU (Station 12)

New York City

• Multiple listings: "Mr. Mailman" and "Mr. Mailman on 53rd Inc" are one and the same. Kate's Market Place in Breezy Point is listed twice despite the fact it opened this past year.
• Better Letter, the CPU I wrote about last March, is also listed twice -- despite the fact that it was forced to shut down on May 30. (The "A&L Management" listing from the Bronx -- that is the Bathgate CPU -- and Brooklyn's Rita's Dry Cleaners CPU suffered the same fate.)
• Among the absences is Fordham University's CPU (Station #37) in the Bronx.
• JW Pharmacy in Flushing, NY is not an actual CPU, though it is listed.

Long Island

• SUNY Old Westbury's CPO is absent, as is the SUNY Stony Brook CPO which closed December 2011. (If Better Letter, which was not open at the end of FY 2012, is listed, shouldn't this be as well?)
• East Hampton's The Corner Store CPU is absent.
• Fire Island's Davis Park CPO is absent.
• Fire Island's Kismet CPO is misspelled 'Kismit'.
• Depot Stationery is misspelled "Stationary" [see below]. Stationary means 'not moving', though I suppose that is a good quality for a given postal operation these days.
• The Fair Harbor CPO is proceeded by "SEAS", meaning seasonal (as in, open only during the summer); interestingly, this annotation is not applied to the other CPOs on Fire Island, for which this is also true.

There are many more errors or inconsistencies where these came from. As such I believe this response to the Chairman's Request should be remanded for further consideration.

The Postal Service has a Lot of Exes...

Here are some former postal sites I've visited of late. Two I had the pleasure of visiting yesterday afternoon in conjunction with a visit to Valley Forge, northwest of Philadelphia.

First up is a post office that was discontinued at some point within the last ten years, a branch of Phoenixville, PA: Mont Clare. Thanks to the OIC of nearby Oaks for telling me where this former site is. Now just a residence, the former postal site is apparent by the handicapped ramp.

Former Mont Clare, PA post office


Fortunately the Phoenixville post office, a stately 1923 facility, isn't far away at all.


Phoenixville, PA post office


I just knew there had to be a grand former post office in Pottstown, PA somewhere. The 1915 behemoth I found on the south side of Main Street, which is now a library, did not disappoint. The cornerstone, bearing "Secretary of the Treasury" on it, was sufficient evidence to prove this was once a P.O.

Former Pottstown, PA Main Post Office



Gotta love when former post offices are still used for civic purposes!

The present Pottstown facility, which is just down the road, is rather bland in comparison.

Pottstown, PA: present post office


Here's a map of the situation:


The Pennsburg branch post office of Red Hill was discontinued a month before I arrived there; it closed September 9, 2011. The vestiges of its signage are still apparent on the former site:


Las Vegas's Strip Station was a casualty of the old SBOC initiative, which ended with the closure of around 160 stations and branches around the country. Google Street View shows the former post office in its pre-March 2011 glory:

Las Vegas, NV: Strip Station post office


I discovered that the site, as currently stands, is less than overwhelming. Heck, it appears to be a construction zone for a new casino parking garage or something.