Mailboxes removed from streets unlikely to come back soon, if ever

The U.S. Postal Service has not yet set any date for when it might return the 124 Bronx mailboxes taken from sidewalks last month, and some of the mailboxes may not be coming back at all, according to a politician who has been in talks with the Postal Service. 

Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz said he spoke with Bronx postal officials last week and was told the Postal Service was still trying to decide which mail receptacles would return to their former locations. According to Dinowitz, the Postal Service has already determined that some of the mailboxes will not be returning to their former locations. 

“They claim that there’s not a need for every one of those mailboxes, there’s always another mailbox within a couple of blocks,” he said. 

For those mailboxes that will be restored, no estimated return date has been set, Bronx Postmaster Lillian Rodriquez told him, Dinowitz said. 

“I was trying to press her on when we would get the mailboxes and then—exactly what I feared—she said, ‘We are still determining when they are going to come back and which ones are going to come back,’” he said. The Postal Service did not respond to a request for comment.

Before the mailboxes went away, some streets in Riverdale an array of them set just a couple of blocks apart. But many of those streets are densely populated and some of the residents have difficulty walking an extra block— a concern Dinowitz stresses. 

“You know for a lot of people—older people, some of these older people, or infirm—maybe they can’t get to one of the other mailboxes or go to the post office,” he said. “Those are the same people that probably don’t pay their bills online. They could end up being late paying a bill, getting a penalty, or whatever.” 

The Postal Service removed the mailboxes in early December, after a spike in “mailbox fishing,” so they could be replaced with newer models that would be more difficult for thieves to get into. The mailbox removal appeared to come without warning and left some people wondering where the mailboxes had gone or why. 

“They should have, if not consulted, at least notified the local representatives from the area, the different areas,” Dinowitz said. “Just so that when people call us we can say—well, this is what happened, they took the mailboxes, they are fixing, it is going to be very good.”  

But instead, “whenever anything is so big—whether it’s a government agency or this [Postal Service], which is sort of slightly separate from the government—when you’re too big you don’t think you need to answer to anybody,” he said.