The endangered Plaza Branch, shown above, is located on the corner of Lemon St. and W. Chapman Ave. Adding to the Mayor's comments, our lovely Orange correspondent writes, "This is the oldest working post office in all of Orange County and there is a threat that the USPS is going to close this branch and auction off the property..." She says many locals fear the property will end up with some sort of inappropriate reuse.
With the threat of the entire U.S. Postal Service going belly-up, this may be just the first in a long string of attempts by communities to find appropriate forms of adaptive reuse for these historically significant buildings. Orange County is lucky to have some really amazing post offices, including Spurgeon Station in Santa Ana, the Plaza Branch in Orange, the Fullerton P.O. (with its wonderful WPA mural), the Main Street P.O. in Huntington Beach, the Wild West-themed branch on Balboa Island, and numerous others.
Let me suggest the following to communities that may suddenly find themselves with an empty historic post office someday soon: How about a museum dedicated to the history of your city? These old post offices are made mostly of non-flammable materials, are located in community hubs or prominent locations, are already ADA compliant, have loading docks and plenty of storage space, and are already historically significant in their own right. What more could you ask for in a museum building?
Speaking of Orange, the Old Town Preservation Association (OTPA) is looking for docents to staff Chapman University’s Elliott Alumni House (formerly the Victorian Tea House) at 204 North Olive St., during their bi-yearly historic homes tour on Nov. 5th and 6th. Shifts run from 10am to 1pm and from 1pm to 4pm. They need approximately five docents per shift, for a total of ten docents per day. Volunteers will be given one free ticket to the home tour. If you're interested in helping, contact lead docent Sue Vaurs via email.
Though at its current location since 1964, the Olive Station dates back to the mid-1880s. This post office is the one of the only surviving business/operations left in the Olive community area. (See http://dragoon1st.tripod.com/olive/branch/community-post-office.html for more information.) It would be sad to see this post office go, since it has had such a long history and would leave Olive with even less surviving history.
ReplyDeleteArg, with so many cities going broke, this kind of thing is probably going to happen more and more often. Once these historic gems are gone, they're gone forever. Sad.
ReplyDeleteActually, the Post Office is not at fault here, federal law required the Post office to fund 75 years’ worth of pensions in only 10 years’ time. USPS has been forced by this insane law to dump tons of money into this fund at an unsustainable rate. They have been “setup” to fail.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, Congress has been robbing these funds to pay for other underfunded programs, just like our Social Security funds. This has made the US post office appear financially unsustainable, when in reality; nothing could be further from the truth, the post office has provided a valuable service, with a high rate of accuracy to millions and millions of homes and Post Office boxes, and at a very affordable rate at being one of the lowest costs in the World.
No tax dollars are used to fund the USPS. Our representatives want to bankrupt USPS and hand it over to the private industries. Tens of thousands of postal employees will be out of work and our mail costs will rise, or we'll just do without.
Call your representatives and ask them to support House Resolution 1351, before they close the doors on our historic Post Offices and their workers. The U.S. Postal Service is as old as our Country; don’t let another tradition and piece of American history die.