Disappearing mailbox blues

As the once ubiquitous icons recede nationwide, some Boston residents say they're feeling the pinch

Like a letter lost behind a cabinet, Joan Rodriguez had been out of circulation for many years when it came to sending mail from her Grove Hall neighborhood.

For nearly two decades, Rodriguez worked as a dental hygienist in Brookline and found it easiest just to drop her letters in a mailbox in front of her office.

Then, in 2004, she had to leave her job after being diagnosed with a cancer that made it hard to walk or even stand.

In the summer of 2006, she had her Van Winkle moment: Standing outside her Seaver Street apartment, letters in hand, she looked to her left. No mailbox. She looked to her right. No mailbox.

"Oh my goodness," she recalls thinking. "Where are the mailboxes?"

It was a far cry from her days growing up in the South End, she remembers, when there seemed to be a mailbox on every corner. She and the other children even used them as bases for games of tag.

As Rodriguez pushed her walker down Seaver Street that summer day, the 500-or-so-foot trip to the local mailbox seemed like a marathon trek. Her muscles throbbed. Her feet burned. She struggled to breathe in and out.

Today, Rodriguez, 43, is still feeling the mailbox blues.

"I can't believe I have to do this, to go to the mail," she says.

Rodriguez's 02121 neighborhood has lost one streetcorner mailbox during the last three years, according to US Postal Service data, at a time when some residents believed that they already didn't have enough.

While some data show that the city as a whole has gained over 100 boxes during that time, most of the additions have come in the downtown districts, a jump demographers attribute to an influx of high-rise residences, burgeoning businesses, and a rush on office space.

Meanwhile, several neighborhoods have lost boxes, part of a downturn that mirrors a long-term national trend. From 2005 to 2006, the number of street mailboxes dropped 12 percent nationwide, according to the postal service's most recent data, from 295,053 to 259,955.

The trusty blue boxes, which have been a fixture on US streetcorners in one shape or color since they were first affixed to lampposts in the mid-1800s, are becoming yet another piece of Americana showing signs of rust.

As with other icons from yesteryear, the mailbox is being kicked to the curb by that web-footed bogeyman, the Internet. Aiding and abetting its demise is that craven creature, the cellphone.

"It's an overall cultural thing," says Yvonne Yoerger, a spokeswoman for the national postal service in Washington.

Rather than rely on snail mail, increasing numbers are paying bills online, conversing by cell, and instant- and text-messaging each other, helping to create a 7 percent drop in first-class mailings between 2000 and 2007, from 103.6 billion to 95.9 billion.

On top of that, people's employment and transportation patterns have changed dramatically.

"Do you get up in the morning, walk around the neighborhood, and go to the store, or do you go to your car and go off to work?" asks Nancy Pope, historian for the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum in Washington.

With many two-parent households opting to mail their letters from work, the neighborhood box is feeling the pinch.

The South End's 02118, for example, has four fewer mailboxes than it had in 2005, records show.

"There aren't any, for real," says Stephney Williams, 21, who was walking last week with her 8-month-old son Aiden down the main drag of Washington Street, where nary a blue box could be seen for block after block.

Postal officials say they use a standard density formula for removing boxes. The boxes are regularly tested, and if over a six-day period are found to be used for fewer than 25 pieces a mail a day on average, they can be considered for being relocated, stored, harvested for parts, or sold off as scrap metal. The box also may stay put, officials say, based on other factors, such as whether there's senior citizen housing that uses it, or there's not another box within a square mile.

Boston area postal officials say it doesn't pay to have letter carriers collect mail from boxes that are underused, or to have to paint and maintain them.

To boot, every penny per gallon increase in gas costs the postal service an additional $8 million a year, Yoerger says.

Besides low volume, safety is another reason for eliminating boxes from their longtime locations, postal officials say. A change in a roadway's traffic scheme, for instance, could bring cars too close to a newly vulnerable streetcorner box, leaving carriers, customers, and motorists in harm's way.

Joana Johnson-Smith lives off Talbot Avenue in Codman Square's 02124, and she says not having a mailbox nearby can put a strain on a person, as well.

On the 8/10 of a mile stretch of Talbot Avenue between Washington Street and Blue Hill Avenue, there are the usual fixings of urban life: a church, several auto body shops, a playground, a basketball court, a bank, and three pay phones.

But not a single mailbox in that stretch. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, the postal service reports an overall gain of one since 2005.

Johnson-Smith is a 56-year-old nurse with bad knees, and she says traveling to a mailbox on two crutches can be a chore. She'd like to see at least one mailbox on that part of Talbot Avenue.

While local postal officials say they can't put a mailbox on every corner, Ann Powers, a spokeswoman for the postal service's Boston district, says it's common practice to leave one's outgoing letters in the household mailbox for local letter carriers to pick up during on their rounds. Johnson-Smith says she'll have none of that, what with identity thieves lurking about nowadays.

Nor is she inclined to use a mailbox off the beaten path. One of them in the vicinity, she says, is too close to gang activity. Others, she says, can fall prey to pranksters using boxes as makeshift garbage bins.

She'll take letters to mail when she goes for a doctor's appointment, but worries she'll lose them on the way. So, sometimes, she'll ride one bus, and then another, just to get to the post office in Codman Square.

After all, she still touches base the old-fashioned way, and has important things to mail: utility bills, life-insurance payments, letters to her children.

Johnson-Smith is standing on her porch, which is adorned with sunflowers and American flags. "I want a mailbox right there," she says, pointing to a green postal box, used only to store mail, that's 40 feet away on the avenue. "I need it."

Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com.