The Old Post Office Restaurant; Edisto Island, SC

If you're looking to get away from the hustle of Charleston, Edisto Island is a photogenic and relaxed community within an hour of the city. It's not commercialized and not heavily trafficked as is Hilton Head Island. I visited both areas in April during a brief jaunt to the South. Of course my mission on Edisto was to photograph the post office, which lies 17 miles down from its nearest, and smaller, (and not to mention highly photogenic) neighbor in Adams Run. The present post office building, a mid-'80s model, is a rather standard structure. The former post office site, however, which I first noticed as a seemingly extraneous dot on the Google Maps app on my phone, is definitely worth a look. It's now the Old Post Office Restaurant, and they've got the old postal window to prove it! But first, a photo of the location.



Here's a general map of the area.



The present post office has been occupied by USPS since June 1985, and its current lease is for $18,500 per year -- $13.21 per interior square foot.

Edisto Island, SC post office


Edisto Island has had a post office since 1832, though USPS's Postmaster Finder does not currently maintain Postmaster information for the office prior to 1950. Edisto Beach, a community about seven miles southwest of the Old Post Office, maintained a short-lived post office that was in operation between 1950 and 1953. (The current Edisto Island post office lies three miles closer to the latter.)

The old Edisto post office [and general store and gas station] was a central meeting point for locals and visitors alike. But the site's significance dates to the late 18th century. According to a story in a Charleston historical magazine, the site "encompasses the restored Bailey House ca. 1799, and Bailey's Store, a pre-war relic from Edingsville Beach, once a thriving, antebellum seaside resort and one of the last, if not the last, surviving commercial building on Edisto Island." [Edingsville Beach lies along the Atlantic, about three miles south of the Old Post Office.]

The present Old Post Office Restaurant is the second such institution to reside at this location. The first O.P.O. Restaurant opened in 1988, three years after the post office moved out. It closed in 2006, but not after having received press coverage in such publications as USA Today and Gourmet Magazine.

The husband-and-wife team of Adam and Toniann Morris picked up the gauntlet soon after the original O.P.O. Restaurant closed. They devoted extensive effort into renovating the property and restaurant facilities -- both while teaching full-time. The present Old Post Office Restaurant opened April 2009, and part of what makes this a fun stop for the postal buff are the little details the couple has worked in to maintain the restaurant's connection to its past. To wit:

The mailbox is beautifully decorated with a stamp and giant Edisto Island postmark.


The old postal window, just inside the entrance.


I love signs on the bathroom doors, highly stylized postmarks in London Underground form:


The Morrises are impeccably friendly. The diners I witnessed while I was in town appeared to be enjoying their meals. With more post office buildings being either sold or shuttered, one can only hope that more owners will recognize and maintain the heritage of these sites, much as the Morrises have.

Other points of interest nearby include the With These Hands Gallery, which is right next door; and the Edisto Island Serpentarium, a few hundred feet down the road.

Beautiful [Former] Post Office: Reidsville, NC

USPS has been on a tear in its recent effort to dispose of historic properties by selling off -- "right-sizing" -- its operations, largely by moving its carriers to facilities built on cheaper land and calling the historic structures too large for its needs. However, the trend of moving from historic buildings to new (and architecturally dull-as-dishwater) structures is not new: previously this was an organic process that resulted when the increasing population of the community caused the Postal Service to outgrow the building, resulting in a larger one somewhere else in town. This is what presumably occurred during the late '70s in Reidsville, NC, a community of 14,000 north of Greensboro and a few miles south of the Virginia border.

(Evan's tip: you can easily calculate when the new post office building was built with this equation: year built = relative distance from center of community; the newer the building, the further away the Postal Service is from the historic or downtown part of the community. It might seem funny, but this formula rarely fails.)

While today most of the historic post office buildings being sold nowadays are given to the highest bidder through real estate corporation CBRE, in the past the buildings were offered to other federal agencies (which had the right of first refusal), then to state agencies, then county officials and the cities themselves before being sold. Through this process the old Reidsville post office became the modern Reidsville City Hall, and the city has retained and maintained the building itself, its fantastic Art Deco architectural details, and the New Deal mural still hanging inside beautifully. This is one of the most effective reuses of an old post office building that I have ever seen.

As always, let's give you a geographic fix.





And now, onto the photos!

Here is the grand building along with a photo of its cornerstone. This is a 1936 structure.





Here is one of the two main entrances, and insets of a lighting fixture, and Art Deco metal detail, and the eagle, all of which are (I believe) original and in impeccable shape.







From the other entrance:



Inside the New Deal mural titled "Tobacco", painted 1938 by Gordon Samstag, resides at its original spot in what is now the Reidsville Finance Office. Here is a photo of the mural and its setting. Note the marble counters, foyer details, and original light fixture.





Let's not show you what the new post office looks like. I'll leave you on a high note. Hope you enjoyed!

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: