The 2019 Calendar of Post Offices and Places

Welcome, welcome, welcome! It's that time of the year again—time for a brand-new iteration of the Postlandia Calendar of Post Offices and Places [update, 2019: product no longer available; link removed]! I'm super-excited for the 2019 edition, which features 12 all-new images of wonderful post office buildings from across the country. I've taken most of these images during the course of my travels spanning all 50 states, and I'm delighted share them with you now.

The 2019 edition takes us thousands of miles: from Hawaii to New England, Utah to Appalachia, and the Northwest to the Heartland. We'll visit a dozen new post offices large and small, urban and remote, each with a distinctive story.

The images are printed in high-resolution on high-quality paper. The dates include not only U.S. holidays but dates significant to American postal history. And, yes, you can write on it! Your ink will not bleed through to next month's organic / fair trade / hand-crafted / barrel-aged post office photo.

Postlandia Calendar cover:


With Postlandia I've always brought you the stories behind the post offices and communities of America, and here you can explore another wide-ranging cross-section of the nation. These photos take you not just from time zone to time zone, but span history as you explore photos from two centuries (from more than 100 years ago to the present).

Where else can you find the post office with ten-minute parking—only for bicycles? Or the post office with a block-long light fixture? How about the 1870 Gothic P.O. that's now a restored event space? There's an archival image of a post office that Franklin D. Roosevelt had a hand in designing, as well as some New Deal artwork. There are also great images of some of the nation's smallest post offices! And more. As always, here you don't just get photos, you get the story behind what makes them unique.

Rhode Island: the post office with its own postage stamp


Kentucky: Lost Americana


Crossroads of America: Postal Gothic

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

Dozens of calendars have already been sold so far this year, and I thank everyone for their support! (It really does make a dent in my gas money bills!)

This is the perfect gift for the special USPS employee in your life; a perfect purchase for philatelist and stamp collectors; and generally speaking, just the perfect post office calendar. The calendar is available at the secure website of the high-quality printer Lulu. Everyone I know who's purchased either the 2017 or 2018 Postlandia post office calendar has loved it!

BONUS!!

Do you love those historic 1930s post offices, more than 1,000 of which house beautiful examples of New Deal artwork? This year I'm introducing a second Lulu calendar: New Deal Legacy! It starts with a bit of postal goodness from the FDR era, but goes way beyond to highlight some of the myriad of accomplishments put forth by various New Deal agencies across the country, including: the Works Progress Administration (WPA); Public Works Administration (PWA); and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

2019 New Deal Legacy Calendar cover:
The projects range from massive developments, to magnificent artwork, to minor local projects that have stood the test of time.

Michigan: Art Deco goodness


Utah: State Capitol grandeur:


The high-resolution images—which range from the 1930s to the present—include the stories that make each one image significant. They are printed on thick, high-quality paper and will hold up to all of your writing-on-your-calendar needs.

Thank you for your continued support!!
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.

2016 Postal Summary

Welcome to Postlandia's seventh annual year-end summary. During 2016 I visited 866 new active postal facilities across 17 states, bringing my grand total to 7,461. This represents the most new visits since 2013. As always, for the active and curious follower, here are the summaries for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. Woot!

Instead of driving cross-country, as I have historically done every four years, I took a handful of flights to regions of the country I wanted to explore further. These included two weeks in the high west: Albuquerque, northern New Mexico and southern Colorado; a week in Alaska (with postal layover in Seattle); a week in the Salt Lake City area / eastern Utah and western Colorado; and a week and a half in the southeast: South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Furthermore, Postlandia friend Kelvin and I explored the northern reaches of Maine and got some great photographs and stories along the way.

This summer I finally visited several post offices accessible only by ferry: Fishers Island, NY; Prudence Island, RI; and the Sophie C Mail Boat in New Hampshire. In Alaska I visited a handful of post offices only accessible by boat or by plane! But that's another post (coming soon!).

Perhaps most significantly this blog got an overdue "re-branding". No more Going Postal; hello, Postlandia! The idea came from the title of a story published a couple of years back. We've also got a great new calendar for you as well.



As always, this year's visits included "standard" post offices, Contract Postal Units (CPUs), and carrier-only and mail processing facilities, not to mention former sites of relocated and discontinued facilities. For example:

Bangor, ME: Broadway Hardware CPU


Portsmouth, NH Processing and Distribution Facility (P&DF)


Alamosa, CO: former post office


Columbia, SC Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC)


But postal journeys weren't all the excitement for Postlandia 2016. Devin Leonard published his great book: Neither Snow Nor Rain [link: NPR story], which tells the story of the Post Office Department (now Postal Service) through the lens of many of the distinctive people and lives who made the institution what it is today. Yours truly is featured in the prologue and epilogue of the book! Devin was gracious enough to invite me to speak at a talk he gave at the New York Public Library this summer.





That's me being highly amused by someone's question.

This followed a presentation at the once-a-decade World Stamp Show at the Javits Center in New York, wherein I got to discuss some of the interesting post offices and places of the Big Apple. And postmarks!

2016 by the Numbers

I visited as many as 34 post offices in one day. State by state, counting only new, distinct active postal locations (including CPUs) for the year:

New York: 115 post offices
Focus/Foci: Modest upstate travels: Rockland, Orange, Sullivan, and Delaware County; west of Syracuse

New Mexico: 109 post offices
Northern New Mexico; Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and numerous Native reservations in NW NM

Connecticut: 91
Northern, southeastern CT; Norwich

Maine: 79
Far north, and eastern Maine; Bangor

Colorado: 71
Southern, western Colorado; Grand Junction, Durango, Pueblo

Georgia: 70
Augusta through Macon, to Thomasville

Utah: 53
Wasatch Valley: Salt Lake City, Provo; and eastern Utah: Vernal

South Carolina: 50
Columbia area; and south toward Charleston and west toward Augusta, GA

Florida: 44
Tallahassee and Orlando areas

Alaska: 43
Anchorage, Wasilla, and the Kenai Peninsula

Pennsylvania: 40
North-central, rural PA

Massachusetts: 32
East of Springfield and east of Worcester

New Jersey: 23
Northern NJ, near NY border

Rhode Island: 22
Northwest, southern RI

Washington: 12
Seattle area

New Hampshire: 11
Southeast N.H.; U.S. Sophie C., Lake Winnipesaukee

Arizona: 1
Teec Nos Pos—closest post office to the Four Corners

Milestones

I achieved post office #7,000, as well as post office #1,000 in just the state of Pennsylvania, during the same afternoon this summer (actually, just a couple of post offices apart). Actually, I've now visited at least 100 post offices in each of 22 states. This year added New Mexico, Maine, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Georgia to that roster. Connecticut now reaches the top five, with 321 different active locations visited.

Me at post office #7,000: Crosby, PA



Me at Pennsylvania post office #1,000: Hazel Hurst, PA

Counting Counties (and States)

I've now visited all 50 states, as well as more than 1,000 counties across the U.S. This map shows the most recent extent of my travels (2016 travels in light pink). There's always so much more to see!



Hope to write more for you soon!
Evan, Postlandia

Seeing Providence (Rhode Island)

Ah, Providence. Imagine: I spent four years at Brown University and didn't even consider photographing every post office within 50 miles! That changed somewhat one day last summer as I was heading back from Boston to New York.

Any postal tour of Providence must begin with the Main Post Office, whose retail operations share a building with the Providence P&DC, carriers for a few ZIP codes, and formerly the Southeast New England District offices (whose operations were removed and divided among Greater Boston and Connecticut Valley last spring as part of USPS's cost-cutting measures).

The Providence MPO was featured on a four-cent 1960 postage stamp, celebrating the fact that it was the nation's first automated post office in the U.S., as part of a project known as Turnkey.


You can read all about the then-$16 million post office and stamp at The National Postal Museum and Trains on U.S. Stamps.

Here's a postcard of the post office (credit).


By now the flora has filled in, making scenes tougher to capture. Here's the front customer entrance:

---

In college I did use a post office all the time, and it wasn't the official Brown University Station: it was the East Side Station on the main commercial row, Thayer Street. Believe it or not, I chose my upperclassmen year residence partly due to proximity to the post office. (Back then I sold used books; my busiest day resulted in three full trips to the post office.) The clerks were great and had character. Here's a photo:



The Brown University Station was discontinued in 2008, when adjacent university mail operations were transferred from historic Faunce House to Walter Hall across the street. Here's a photo of the exterior of the former site.



Normally I would say that closing a campus post office is a bad idea. In this case, the East Side Station is rather close to the campus PO site that the effect on the community might not be significant -- although the discontinued site is closer to the administrative buildings on campus.

Providence's Friar Station is a classified unit located above the mailroom on the Providence College campus is being considered for discontinuance under RAOI; in this instance it would be a bad idea to close the office. Students who live on campus and who don't have a vehicle would have to walk a mile to the nearest facility: North Station (which is also being considered for discontinuance -- another poor idea), or find their way under a highway to the industrial-area Providence MPO. Neither comes across as a particularly reasonable alternative, especially if you want to build a relationship with your supposed future generation of customers.

Friar Station closes for the summer. Here's a photo:


The stately North Station post office. Note the gorgeous integration of the signage into the building:


Downtown you've got the Annex Station, which shares residence with the federal courthouse. Here the procedure for mailing a package is unusual, one I've never seen before in analogous settings elsewhere: You have to first walk over and get your package scanned through the x-ray machines (metal detectors?) at the courthouse security checkpoint before it can be given to the PO. This is to assure that the mail won't pose a threat to the building once it is accepted. Interesting.

Providence, RI: Annex Station:


Another Providence post office being studied for closure is the Weybosset Hill Station, which seemed busy enough when I visited it. I doubt it'll actually be discontinued since it's the only facility in the area.


Providence has some other offices, but I think that's sufficient for now. Hope you enjoyed the postal tour!

Old PO, New Life: East Greenwich, RI

By 2:00 I visited all 19 of my mapped-out south Providence-area post offices. Which means, in American Pickers lingo, that it's time for free-styling. Since the destination that evening was NYC, I headed south. My first idea for a place to stop at was the town of East Greenwich.

East Greenwich is Exit 8 off Rhode Island Route 4, and a reasonable way to hunt for a post office is to check downtown. As soon as I made a right off Main Street I found a striking building that could not be anything but a 1930s WPA post office:


In going inside I learned that the building has long served as a high-class Italian restaurant, although it has been closed since January 2011 for apparently interesting reasons. When I saw it this summer it was being remodeled, and from my understanding is expected to reopen. This building served as the post office from the Great Depression to the 1970s, at which point it moved to what someone told me was now the police station. In the 2000s it moved again, to a site in the outskirts of town.

Inside the entrance: Post Office Café.

There was no interior artwork. Below is the present East Greenwich Post Office site:



And here's a map:

DPO'd: Valley Falls, RI

The Pawtucket branch post office in Valley Falls, RI lies just 1.2 miles to its nearest companion in Lincoln, RI. Still, it's a shame to see a post office with nice old P.O. boxes and a friendly Clerk-in-Charge disappear. Valley Falls is the historic part of Cumberland, RI. Think old mills. The community is working-class and when I visited the office on Tuesday, residents seemed very disappointed to see their place on the map vanish.

Today, July 8, is Valley Falls's last day. The post office was the only one in Rhode Island that kept its name on the SBOC Consolidation 'Hit List'.

For perspective, here is a map of Valley Falls with respect to Pawtucket, RI and Providence:


View Larger Map

Valley Falls shares a ZIP code with larger Cumberland (post office: 3 miles north); but I was disappointed to see that the signage on the building itself actually does say Cumberland on it, as opposed to Valley Falls:



USPS has a lease on the building for two more years... so of course they're shutting it down now.