I was staggering around in western Queens in July 2020, crazed from the humidity, when I found this mailbox trio. The mailbox on the left, painted olive green, is called a relay mailbox and is used to store mail to be delivered. Mail can be heavy, and the carts that mail carriers push around can only hold so much; so about ten thousand of these relay mailboxes can be found around town.
In the center is a standard issue mailbox of which thousands can be seen around town. Most of the ones you see now were installed in 2018 and have a small slot on top big enough to admit small envelopes. That year, the USPS, fearing that bombs or explosives could be dropped into the boxes, replaced the hinged openings that were formerly featured with new ones with the small slots. The date of installation can be found near the bottom on one side, but as I’ve said, all now have a date of 2018 or later. I could occasionally find 1950s mailboxes now and then, before the change was made.
The pebbled post on the right used to carry small slotted mailboxes, and when I started in with This Thing of Mine in 1998, I could still find a small number of them around town; but all are gone now. These, too, can occasionally be found with the dates of installation stamped on the post, but not all.
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2/2/23