The U.S. Postal Service is trying to sell many of its historical buildings to
private developers as it looks for ways to cut losses that reached a record
$15.9 billion in 2012.
The fire sale started gaining momentum two years ago after the Postal Service
hired the commercial real estate firm CBRE to oversee the properties, many of
them relics of the New Deal era. Of the 58 post offices currently listed, six
are on the National Register of Historic Places.
The listing prices vary, from $8.3million for the 16,930-square-foot Nat King
Cole Post Office in Los Angeles to $55,000 for the modest, 1,262-square-foot
post office in Petersburg, Va.
"Due to decreasing mail volumes, the Postal Service has an infrastructure that
is too big, and we have spent the past two years consolidating mail processing
facilities in an attempt to right-size the organization," Postal Service
spokeswoman Sue Brennan said.
Last year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the post office as
one of the United States' 11 most "endangered historic places" after the USPS
identified nearly 4,400 post offices it would study for potential closure.
Peter Malkin, whose holdings include the Empire State Building, bought the
Greenwich, Conn., post office two years ago for about $15million in an attempt
to keep the building's historic nature intact. A similar deal played out last
summer when a group of developers in Reno bought the city's 78-year-old downtown
post office for $1.2 million.
In other communities, such as Ukiah, Calif., the sales have resulted in bitter
political battles in which developers have purchased the building only to leave
residents guessing what will come next.
"Generally speaking, they get turned into retail complexes like the one in
Reno," said Steve Hutkins, a literature professor at New York University who
runs the website Save the Post Office. He noted the post office in Venice,
Calif., that is now set to become an office for Joel Silver, the Hollywood
producer behind The Matrix and Lethal Weapon.
He said about 2,200 of the nation's post offices were built during the Great
Depression as a morale booster for a country that was losing confidence in its
government.
"So to see them turned into a restaurant or a film studio or real estate office
or law offices is just undoing all of that," Hutkins said. "Frankly, I think the
effort to privatize them is to remove all signs that the government can do great
things."
After they bought the city's downtown post office last summer, the Reno
developers announced they had plans to turn the three-story art deco building
into a high-end retail center on the banks of the Truckee River.
Before work can start, Nevada's State Historic Preservation Office will be
required to approve any changes to the building, which includes about $5 million
in repairs and asbestos removal.
"Once we get those approvals done, then we can start the process of improving
the building," said Bernie Carter, one of the developers. "Those redevelopment
plans include a whole new roof on the building."
Municipalities have purchased some post offices in an attempt to keep them open.
In Boone, N.C., the town's planning department will set up shop in the downtown
post office after the Town Council agreed to buy the 73-year-old building for
$1million, said Bill Bailey, Boone's planning director. In turn, the town leased
a portion of the building back to the Postal Service to keep the post office
running.
Of the 31,300 Postal Service branches across the nation, about 8,900 are owned
by the government, and the rest are leased.
Although the Postal Service has identified thousands of locations for potential
closure, there's no telling how many will be sold. There are plans to sell the
post office in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Georgetown, "one of the
oldest post offices in the country," said Nancy Pope, a historian at the
Smithsonian's National Postal Museum in Washington.
Pope said the local post office for decades was the only interaction many
Americans had with the federal government. "As a society we don't want to let it
go," Pope said.
Duggan also reports for the Reno Gazette-Journal
