Sunday, January 9, 2011

I left my mailbox in San Francisco

So, I'm in San Francisco, and I'm riding on a cable car on my way to see the Golden Gate Bridge. And the cable car only goes so far -- then I have to get off and get on a real bus to go out to the bridge.

So the cable car gets to the end of the line, near Fisherman's Wharf, and I step off the cable car and start to walk down the street ... And there it was.

A Jebco mailbox. Painted olive drab green, no less -- a Postal Service relay mail box, now obsolete in some areas (but still in use in others as recently as 2003, according to posters on that online forum).

I'm not sure if this one was still being used by the Post Office in San Fran or not. The date-stamp on the box is 1986.






























2 comments:

  1. That's a relay box, where postmen would hang bags of mail gathered from blue mailboxes in the area. Then all the gathered mail would get picked up at this relay point. they're HUGE.

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  2. It's amazing to me that I can walk from home to the Metro, past Giant, Target, all that stuff, and not see a mailbox.

    Fine if they want to get rid of some of the random ones (like, er, 10th and Otis, which is actually quite near my home but I can't convince myself that it's real because it's so random). But it's insane to not have one somewhere it sight of the Metro or the shopping center.
    residential mailboxes

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