Grant Street Post Office Closing?
The U.S. Postal Service has scheduled a public meeting to "discuss plans
for the Grant Street Station Post Office" on Tuesday Afternoon,
November 29, 2011 at 4:00 p.m. EST in the offices of CB Richard Ellis,
in Suite 1400 of the U.S. Steel Building in Downtown Pittsburgh.
Apparently, postal authorities plan to abandon the present Grant Street
Post Office location in Pittsburgh's historic U.S. Post Office and
Courts Building, for a downsized post office elsewhere
downtown.
Last week I found the following announcement posted to
the entrance doors of the Grant Street Post Office Downtown, at Seventh
Avenue and Grant Street:
United States Postal Service
You are invited to attend a
Public Meeting
November 29th, 2011
from 4:00 PM
at the
offices of CB Richard Ellis
US Steel Building
600 Grant
Street Suite 1400
at which time representatives of the
United States Postal Service will
discuss plans for the
Grant Street Station
Post Office
Considering
the meeting place is the office of a real estate development firm, it
seems that the U.S. Postal Service does plan to downsize and relocate
the Grant Street Post Office, out of the historic U.S. Post Office and
Courts Building, to another location downtown.
Similar
relocations, from historic downtown main post offices, have occurred in
other major cities including Washington DC, Cincinnati, Philadelphia,
and Chicago (More on Philadelphia relocation:
http://andrewcarnegie2.tripod.com/transit/po/phila.html ),
In
those cities, the original, classic post office lobby was retained and
reused. In Pittsburgh, the original, classic post office lobby is
long-gone, having been gutted and "modernized" in the 1970s.
The
1970s "modernization" reconfigured the lobby and reduced its
size. Before the lobby reconfiguration, a second major lobby entrance
existed via a marble staircase from the south Grant Street entrance to
the building. Following the reconfiguration, the Seventh Avenue entrance
became the only major entrance.
For a time, people could access
the postal lobby by elevator, from the south Grant Street entrance.
However, with increased security enhancements for the courthouse section
of the building, this elevator access is no longer permitted to the
public.
This type of relocation is nothing new for small town
post offices. Three years ago, the U.S. Postal Service abandoned a
historic, 1916 post office building in the Borough of Carnegie, moving
the Carnegie Post Office to a small storefront facility a half-block
away!
I have rented a post office box (P.O. Box 1041) at the Grant Street Post Office Station for more than 20 years.
When
I first rented the box in 1988, there were two mail deliveries (at
10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.) to this post office box each weekday. The
Postal Service had tried to cut this to one delivery per day in the late
1970s; apparently businesses complained and twice-a-weekday delivery
was restored soon after. However, within a couple years
after I started renting the post office box, delivery became once-a-day
(12:00 Noon), permanently.
Since the 1934 opening of the Grant
Street Post Office, the postal lobby had been open to the public
24/7/365 up until the opening of the General Mail Facility on California
Avenue, North Side, in 1983. From then on, the Grant Street Post Office
lobby has closed each weekday evening at 6:00 p.m.
Construction
of the General Mail Facility was delayed about 10 years, after the 1970
bankruptcy of the Penn-Central Railroad. Previously, Penn-Central had
planned a huge redevelopment of the company's Strip District properties
into a commercial, office, and residential complex that was called Penn
Park. The Post Office had planned to build the General Mail Facility as
part of the Penn Park development, on 25th Street between Liberty and
Penn Avenues. With this property now part of the bankruptcy proceedings,
the Post Office decided to construct
the new facility on a North Side site.
This public meeting is
not a meeting where the U.S. Postal Service is asking the opinions of
the public. It is a meeting where they are telling the public what they
have already decided to do. This is similar to a public meeting I
attended in 2003, when Carnegie Library told Hazelwood residents they
were going to close their historic, 1900 library building, in favor of a
downsized rental facility:
http://andrewcarnegie.tripod.com/hazelwood/
gaw
Glenn A. Walsh, Project Director,
Friends of the Zeiss <
http://friendsofthezeiss.org >
Electronic Mail - <
gawalsh@planetarium.cc >
SPACE & SCIENCE NEWS, ASTRONOMICAL CALENDAR:
<
http://buhlplanetarium.tripod.com/#news >
Twitter: <
http://twitter.com/spacewatchtower >
Facebook: <
http://www.facebook.com/pages/SpaceWatchtower/238017839577841?sk=wall >
Blog: <
http://spacewatchtower.blogspot.com/ >
Author of History Web Sites on the Internet --
* Buhl Planetarium, Pittsburgh:
<
http://www.planetarium.cc >
* Adler Planetarium, Chicago:
<
http://adlerplanetarium.tripod.com >
* Astronomer, Educator, Optician John A. Brashear:
<
http://johnbrashear.tripod.com >
* Andrew Carnegie & Carnegie Libraries:
<
http://www.andrewcarnegie.cc >
* Civil War Museum of Andrew Carnegie Free Library:
<
http://garespypost.tripod.com >
*
Duquesne Incline cable-car railway, Pittsburgh:
<
http://inclinedplane.tripod.com >
* Public Transit:
<
http://andrewcarnegie2.tripod.com/transit >
