2019 Postal Summary

It's hard to imagine that this blog was founded nearly a decade ago, and that this is my TENTH Postal Summary. I didn't write a lot here this past year... it's not because I haven't been up to anything (quite the contrary!), but I've been focusing more of my energies on the quicker 'n easier Instagram world. Postlandia has a popular, growing Instagram feed. I posted more than 400 (mostly) postal-related photos in 2019, including at least three P.O.s from every U.S. state.

(As always, my prior summaries can be found at these links: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Starting next year I'm just gonna link to this page with entries tagged "annual postal summary," heh. Let's go!)

2019 was an exciting year. I visited a decent 708 new, active postal operations this year across 18 states (in addition to re-visiting classics in New York). After correcting for a handful of errors in my spreadsheet, my grand total is now 9,994 post offices.

This year's travels included three major trips:
1. Puerto Rico / the U.S. Virgin Islands (17 days, all 144 post offices)
2. Ohio Valley / South (21 days, 351 new POs)
3. Delmarva Peninsula / eastern Virginia (13 days, 213 new POs)

Here I am at the San Antonio, Puerto Rico post office—my last in the territory, 11 days after my first. I'm holding a big, paper AAA map with every post office in Puerto circled (and highlighted, once I visited them); my finger is pointing to the San Antonio post office in the upper left corner:



Me at the Frederiksted, V.I. post office—my last in the territory, at the end of two days visiting its three main islands:



I was fortunate to be able to attend the First Day ceremony of the Post Office Murals stamps in Piggott, Arkansas on April 10, stopping at a forum: Postal Places, at Carnegie Mellon University on April 26, an event with an impressive roster of guests from postal circles. Sadly I can't find a link to the four amazing grad student-developed projects online, but here is a link to the course online.



During my trip to Delmarva [Delaware / Maryland / Virginia] I took a couple of side trips into Chesapeake Bay to visit the two post offices at Smith Island, Maryland, as well as the post office in Tangier Island, Virginia. Here I am at the latter:



Thank you to the dozens of people who purchased the 2020 Postlandia calendar! 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.

I had some fun mailing packages in 2019...

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. Here are some assorted photos from various operations I've visited this year:

Cataño, Puerto Rico Detached Mail Delivery Unit


Virginia Beach, Virginia: McDonald Garden Center CPU


North Little Rock, Arkansas (former site, now library)


Paducah, Kentucky Carrier Annex


I continued documenting the U.S. Postal Service's New Deal treasures as well, for example:

Eutaw, Alabama: "The Countryside," by Robert Gwathmey (1941)

2019 By the Numbers

I visited as many as 34 post offices (of which 31 were new) in one day this year (in the Delmarva Peninsula portion of Virginia). State by state—and territory by territory:

Puerto Rico: 132 post offices
Focus/Foci: [All post offices in the territory]

Virginia: 118 post offices
Eastern counties of the Delmarva Peninsula; Hampton Roads; Richmond

Arkansas: 79 post offices
Northeast corner; Little Rock south to El Dorado

Louisiana: 70 post offices
North central Louisiana; Alexandria

Maryland: 58 post offices
Eastern Shore

Kentucky: 47 post offices
Ohio River Valley (western counties); Berea

Delaware: 34 post offices
North of Wilmington; eastern shore; Sussex County

Missouri: 32 post offices
Southeastern corner

Alabama: 27 post offices
Birmingham; northeast corner

Pennsylvania: 21 post offices
North of Pittsburgh

Tennessee: 19 post offices
Chattanooga; Cleveland; Jellico

Mississippi: 17 post offices
East of Jackson to Meridian

Indiana: 12 post offices
Evansville, to wit:



U.S. Virgin Islands: 12 post offices
[All post offices in the territory]

West Virginia: 12 post offices
Huntington; Charleston north

Massachusetts: 7 post offices
South of Quabbin Reservoir

Ohio: 5 post offices
Random Akron to Columbus; Marietta north

Georgia: 3 post offices
Dade County (NW corner)

Illinois: 2 post offices
Brookport; Cairo

North Carolina: 1 post offices
Knotts Island

This year I finished visiting every post office in Delaware, even getting to visit the post office at Dover Air Force Base. The impetus for the trip was the 58th annual Post Mark Collectors Club (PMCC) Convention, which took place in Dover, Delaware back in late September.

The "kids' table," PMCC convention:


Me at Talleyville Branch, Wilmington, DE, my final post office in the First State:


Counting Counties:
I visited 100 new counties in 2019. They are the dark blue counties east of Texas and south of New York on this travel map:



Dear readers, thank you for your continued support! I'm hoping to share many more new post office stories and photos with you in 2020.

Penny-Wise and Dollar-Absurd: Postal Logic in California

No businessman in his right mind would pull his consumer-oriented retail operation out of a high-traffic shopping plaza and place it, instead, miles away, in an industrial building, behind iron fences, at the end of a difficult-to-access dead-end road beside a highway.

Of course there are some operative words in that statement; I'll let you figure out which words those are.

Facilities folks in California have been consolidating operations left and right, taking postal retail operations out of commercial districts and shoving them into carrier annexes along the edges of communities: Ukiah, Santa Monica, and El Segundo come to mind from the past year. Many of the retail operations being closed and unceremoniously disposed of include historic buildings from the early 20th century and the Great Depression. (See: Venice, Santa Monica, La Jolla, and Ukiah.) This has been accomplished done over many of the communities' dead bodies. But the most absurd plan stems from the area of Thousand Oaks, which lies between Los Angeles and Ventura. Here the Postal Service wants to consolidate the Newbury Park Branch [retail operation] into the Newbury Park Carrier Annex. I actually spent two nights at a hotel right by the Newbury Park post office last summer when my car needed brake work.

To give you a geographic fix:


USPS currently leases the Newbury Branch post office for $179,232 a year. There seems to be good reason for this; according to the USPS California Leased Facilities Report, the post office has been in this shopping plaza since May 1968. The present lease expires in April. This site was chosen to be as accessible to members of the community as possible, and has clearly served this purpose well. Let's access a visual:


I was one of five customers at the time I visited the branch. The location also has stacks of P.O. Boxes and is accessible to box customers after hours and during weekends. One guesses the woman in the photograph above finds this location very convenient.

As Save The Post Office has previously detailed, there are 14 retail outlets, including a UPS Store, in that shopping plaza. My hotel was across the street, and three more shopping plazas are nearby. All the restaurants, grocery stores, drugstores, car repair shops, and In-N-Out Burgers are over in this commercial district. Basically, anything a Californian wants is here, and that's why the post office is here to begin with—people go here.

The Postal Service owns and has operated the Newbury Park Carrier Annex since 2001. It's a facility that was designed to be on cheap remote land, accessed only by carriers who head in and drive their trucks out of there as soon as humanly possible. As you can see, it's not exactly the epitome of warm and inviting:



It's incredibly unappealing even if you can see the actual building:


(Behind this is the stunning vista of six lanes of asphalt!)

Clearly, it's an utilitarian structure. It's in the industrial part of 'town'. Though, actually, it's not in any part of town. There's a steep hill behind it, so don't expect much development nearby anytime soon. And out of curiosity, can you find any windows on here? Google has a nice 45-degree aerial view of the site:


Let's check out some maps!



The Newbury Park Carrier Annex is a 2.5- to 3.1-mile drive from the Newbury Park retail site, depending the route you take. I drove the route and can tell you firsthand that the directions are not straightforward. There are immediate-turns-after-turns, curves, and freeway entrances to avoid. That, and any customer expecting a commercial venue would wonder whether they're even on the right road when heading to the Annex. Without an accurate map you will most likely get lost at least once.

The satellite view shows a clearer picture of the Newbury Park land use patterns.



Residential areas are located primarily south of the highway, as is the primary retail District including the present Newbury Park post office. North of the highway, you find primarily office parks, industrial companies, and The Home Depot -- specialized operations not designed to be visited by everyday consumers on a daily basis.

So Where's Waldo the Carrier Annex? Down 0.6 miles of dead-end road, past a church and operations such as Verizon Wireless Business Services, Westlake Sheet Metal and Advanced Solar Electric. This location could be physically closer for some residents, but mentally it's a complete pain in the butt. No matter what other errands or plans you have that day, you have to head 2.5 miles in the other direction.

This said, what would you expect to result from the Postal Service's current plans? Well I wouldn't want to have to drive three miles out of my way to access my P.O. Box, so maybe I'd close the Box. Perhaps I'd move it to the still-conveniently-located UPS Store instead. Maybe I'd give UPS a chance for my packages, because I'm conducting all my afternoon shopping right in the shopping plaza, and not three miles to the middle of nowhere. Tell me the Newbury Park post office will not lose a great proportion of its revenue as a result of Facilities' charade.

If the Postal Service were intentionally trying to drive away customers -- if it were intentionally trying to make itself less relevant to the public than it claims it has already become, then it could do no better than to move its retail operations here. At the moment, the Postal Service is located in a prime retail spot that has served it well for nearly 45 years. If it ain't broke, don't fix it; right? Instead, USPS could not have picked a better location within the entire community to make itself more inaccessible and uninviting.

The site for the Newbury Park Carrier Annex was chosen for cheap land and to be used by employees only. It should remain that way.

Here's one final satellite view:

For the Record: What's a Carrier Annex?

(Folks can get full information about Carrier Annexes, at least if they know where one is, or if one's mail is delivered from one, by using 1-800-ASK-USPS, selecting option 5 from the main menu, stating "delivery offices", and entering the ZIP code in question. These locations' addresses are also noted on USPS's published Leased / Owned Facilities Report. So what I'm posting here, while not commonly known, is not really sensitive information. The photos I provide here are solely of the buildings' fronts and taken from public roads. For the record, the fantastic resource that is the Post Mark Collectors Club (PMCC)'s impeccable Post Office Directory notes the existence of annexes.)

The postal facilities with which most of the American populace is familiar are USPS retail facilities -- Post Offices, classified branches and stations. Of course, USPS involves the delivery of mail as well as its intake. Excluding the world of CPUs, P&DC/Fs, Vehicle Maintenance Facilities, and other various postal knickknacks, of interest in this entry is the delivery operation, which is often conducted at a postal Carrier Annex. Many post offices will have both retail and carriers in the same facility, but sometimes these operations are separated. Retail-only urban locations are often called Finance Stations, and carrier-only bases are called Carrier Annexes (or, at times, Detached Carrier Units).

Since not many people get to see them, I thought it would be fun to show a couple and explain how they can come to be.

Standalone Carrier Annexes
A good example of a standalone carrier annex is Connecticut's Guilford/Madison Carrier Annex, which lies between the two pleasant towns on the state's coast (south of I-95). Constructed in 2000, it is overseen by the Guilford Postmaster and is responsible for the delivery of mail to two towns.

Guilford, CT: Guilford/Madison Carrier Annex
60 Shoreline Dr., Guilford, CT

I don't believe there's customer package pickup at this location.

Saco, ME: Biddeford/Saco Carrier Annex
81 Industrial Park Road, Saco, ME

Similar to the Guilford/Madison Annex, this serves multiple towns, and it reports to the Saco post office. Based on what I saw there is no passenger pickup at this location.



In most cases, standalone Carrier Annexes are constructed because a community has grown and a post office's operations have outgrown its present space. This was the case in Springfield, New Jersey (below). The Carrier Annex was originally the Main Post Office, but the retail and delivery operations have since split. In the case of Springfield, NJ, the retail operations moved just across the street.

Former Springfield, NJ post office and current Springfield, NJ Carrier Annex:

There is customer package pickup available at this location.

Present Springfield, NJ [retail] post office:


In large cities it is often the case that a classified station, which used to maintain both retail and carriers, has split into two operations. One great example is my favorite carrier facility, the Ryder Carrier Annex in Brooklyn, NY. I wrote all about that in this GP entry. (If you haven't seen that entry before, check it out -- I promise it's worth it.)

Several such splits have occurred in the Philadelphia area, wherein the retail operations of at least three post office stations bubbled off and left their carrier operations behind. One is the Fairmount Station / Carrier Annex, both shown in this post. Another is the Roxborough Carrier Annex, which, as seen from the signage, used to be a full Station:


The retail operations moved a couple of blocks away, into a former movie theater.
Philadelphia, PA: Roxborough Station post office


(Bonus: The former former Roxborough Station, now a beer distributor!)


Similarly, Philadelphia's Point Breeze Carrier Annex was a full-fledged station and also has customer package pickup:


The Point Breeze Station post office now lies in a strip mall:


I've witnessed a couple of instances in which one town's carrier annex is attached to another town's Main Post Office. One such example is the Scarsdale, NY Carrier Annex, attached to the Hartsdale, NY post office. They occupy the same building, but the Scarsdale Postmaster runs the Annex while the Hartsdale Postmaster manages his operations separately.

Here's a view of that building, focusing on the Scarsdale Annex side:


The Bear, DE post office houses the carriers for Newark ["Nu-WARK"], DE; so in the front is the Bear Post Office, and in the back is the Newark Carrier Annex. Here is the building:


Some annexes can be rather large, like the Trenton, NJ Carrier Annex, which is located in Yardville and is located near the Main Office on Rt. 130.


In Camden, NJ, the carriers for many ZIP codes are all located in one facility known as the Camden Delivery Distribution Center:

This is among those annexes that are off-limits to the general public. Only postal employees are allowed to enter. You wouldn't believe how many No Trespassing signs they have put up there.

Sometimes you get facilities which used to handle primarily packages: Parcel Post Annexes, which these days I'm rather certain are just carrier annexes. One example is Rutherford, NJ's East Rutherford Parcel Post Annex. Another is the New Hyde Park, NY Parcel Post Annex, located two short blocks from its principal office:


The only standalone annex in Salem, OR is known as the Hollywood DCU [Detached Carrier Unit]:


(Yep, that was off postal property; just a telephoto.) There are plenty of DCUs in the Portland, OR area as well.

In many cases, carrier annexes, which might have been founded ten years ago, are being reconnected with their long-lost retail counterparts due to the consolidation of carrier routes (or, as USPS would say, 'diminishing mail volume'). This often results in a game of what I like to call "Musical Carriers", in which (for one example I know), carriers are being moved from a Main Post Office that is being sold into two outlying carrier facilities; a few months later one of those buildings is expected to close and the carriers once again move into another or two carrier-only facilities. It's not easy being a carrier these days.

Hope you enjoyed this hodgepodge of an entry!

On the Hit List: Philly Stations

I suspect most of these won't come to fruition, but a huge slew of post offices in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia [scroll down] are being studied for potential closure. Obviously they won't close anywhere near to all of them. Nevertheless I thought I'd highlight a couple of Philadelphia stations I've visited.

One, the 30th Street Station Post Office of Philadelphia was highlighted in this GP entry. Analysis: Possible. While it's a busy location, it's also two blocks from the Philadelphia Main Post Office, and that's an excuse that USPS has used a lot of late to shut places down. Airport post offices have been easy closure targets, and transit centers may follow. That's because none of these represent specific communities, and the customers might just be passers-through; so there's little resistance to their closure. In a future post I'll present another train station post office, near Philadelphia, that's recently been discontinued.

Philadelphia: Fairmount Station


Analysis: Possible; could be re-combined into the Fairmount Carrier Annex from which it split, about an eight-minute walk away.

(Fairmount Carrier Annex)


Philadelphia: Schyulkill Station


Analysis: Not on your life. The only reason the office is on the list is because the community is poorer than average; but it's the only one accessible to a large community of people. This one's staying open.

Philadelphia: Kingsessing Station


Philadelphia: Overbrook Station


Analysis: Not on your life. See above. (If any of these get discontinued, I'll personally lead the PRC filing to keep them open.)

Taking Pity on Google, Part II

Here are some further edits to postal markers the author has made:

Pawcatuck, CT: post office was unlisted. Now it is correctly placed.

View Larger Map

Wakeman, OH: post office was shown to be west of Monroeville; the marker was nearly 20 miles away. It is now properly placed.


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Northeast U.S.: Carrier Annexes

Ever curious where a Carrier Annex is? Wonder no more: every marker point on this map is a new edit / addition [edit-ion?]. This one's not an easy task.

> Some were listed as being full-fledged post offices, which is misleading (Trenton Carrier Annex; Madison, NJ Carrier Annex; Elmsford, NY Carrier Annex).

> Others were the site for carrier and retail operations, but have still split; those listings had still read 'US Post Office' though they are now just carrier facilities: Springfield, NJ Carrier Annex; Brooklyn, NY: Ryder Carrier Annex.

> Still more were just not shown at all, partly because USPS reveals very little information about them and because they aren't open for customer retail operations in any case. Here are some brand-new listings: Guilford/Madison [CT] Carrier Annex; Great Neck [NY] Carrier Annex; Revere [MA] Carrier Annex.

I'm still working on them, so there will be more to come.


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There are many more to fill in to the Boston area; this is a start:


View Larger Map

Youngstown, OH: I removed the listings for the East Side and South Side Stations, which were closed earlier this month and covered in this GP entry.

Two-for-one Post Offices

In my travels I've come across a couple of facilities that serve as the home to more than one post office. I'll explain. Ordinarily, a post office is an independent building in its own community. Sometimes a post office is outside its community: Trenton, NJ's MPO is technically in "Hamilton Township", though it serves Trenton.

A bit north of Princeton, NJ, there is one building that hosts the post offices for two communities. They used to lie in two separate buildings, about a mile apart, but they've since learned to share. Kendall Park and Franklin Park are two independent post offices possessing different Postmasters, distinct PO box sections, and two different postmarks, though it has only one retail counter. The Franklin Park PM works in a different building and you have to ask the clerk for its postmark from the back. Here's a picture of the building:



I came across a similar, but by no means identical, situation in Westchester County, New York: the Hartsdale post office shares a facility with the Carriers of the Scarsdale post office. The Hartsdale Postmaster has no authority in the Scarsdale half of the building (which is under the jurisdiction of the Scarsdale Postmaster, who works at their main office). Again, each has its own postmark dater.

Brooklyn, NY: Another Nice Touch

Especially in large cities, there are postal facilities that aren't for customers. They go by various names in different parts of the country, but in the Northeast we call them Carrier Annexes. They're the places where postal carriers for certain communities are based.

[In Oregon, they have DCUs -- Detached Carrier Units; some go by other designations as well.]

The coolest carrier annex I've seen is in Brooklyn, NY: the Ryder Carrier Annex. It formerly held the retail operations for the community, but the "finance" operations moved three blocks down to a new facility. The old building features two full-wall murals by a Long Island artist named Bonnie Siracusa (who also painted a mural of the Brooklyn Dodgers inside the new Ryder Station post office).

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Rear: 'U.S. Post Office Ryder Station Salutes America's Birthday.'