Wait a Minute, Mr. Postman
A Postal Service clerk said it could take months to repaint a vandalized mailbox.
By Bert Stratton
Jan. 10, 2024 5:54 pm ET
215
Gift unlocked article
Listen
(3 min)
image
A repainted mailbox in Lakewood, Ohio. PHOTO: BERT STRATTON
Lakewood, Ohio.
I wanted to repaint a graffiti-tagged U.S. Postal Service mailbox. It sits in front of an apartment building my family has owned since 1965 in Lakewood, Ohio. I wanted to make it blue again. That simple. This would be like an art project, but it wouldn’t be cool or edgy. Just the opposite. Call it “Keeping Up the Neighborhood.”
I had hoped the Postal Service would do the job, but I had no such luck. A clerk at the neighborhood branch told me in 2021 that it would take “months, not weeks” to clean the box. He said the Postal Service had only one person in northeastern Ohio dedicated to the task.
When 2022 came around and the graffiti was still on the mailbox, I wrote the mayor. She wrote back: “Our building department has documented the vandalism on this mailbox. Please let your tenant know that we share in his frustration; however, we are prohibited from removing graffiti from mailboxes because they are property of the United States Postal Service. We will reach out to USPS again to convey the need to fix this problem without delay.”
Months passed, and I wrote the mayor again: “One of my tenants is really annoyed with this situation and wants to buy blue paint. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to go to Leavenworth prison. Hah! Anything you folks can do?” (The so-called “tenant” was actually me, the landlord.)
The mayor said no, and I couldn’t hold it against her. The feds had her in a no-win situation. I knew she was anti-graffiti; the city occasionally cites me and other landlords for graffiti on our buildings, and we’ve dealt with it, using wire brushes, graffiti remover and elbow grease.
Last year I bought a can of Rust-Oleum deep-blue spray paint at Home Depot. I asked one of my employees to do the hit job—a repaint of the mailbox—and he said no way. So I did it myself. I worked at midday but made sure nobody was walking by while I painted.
My shade of blue was slightly off—I should have used navy—but it was close enough. I didn’t win an art prize, yet here we are in 2024 with a clean blue box. I have the spray-paint can in my car in case the graffiti-artist strikes again. “Keeping Up the Neighborhood” is a work in progress.
Mr. Stratton is author of the blog Klezmer Guy: Real Music & Real Estate