Photo by Maryland Route 5The T Street Station Post Office is moving up the block, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton announced in a press release yesterday.
Seeking to calm the nerves of some, Norton also said that the Shaw residents and businesses who rely on the mail depot, currently located at 1915 14th Street NW, would not experience a break in service when the post office’s lease expires at the end of this month. The post office, she said, will be relocating to the Frank D. Reeves Center at 14th and U streets.
The eventual closure of the T Street Post Office has been a long, slow burn. News first trickled out in January 2011 that it would be closing, along with several other post offices around town. By November it appeared to be set to close at the end of the year.
The current location, on the corner of 14th and Wallach streets, is set to come down to make way for a seven-story condominium building. The U.S. Postal Service originally elected to close 19 offices across the District in an effort to pare its financial hemorrhaging—the system is expected to lose $5 billion in 2012. After enough hawing from residents and elected officials, eight of the 19 depots were taken off the block.
Still, the remaning 11, including the T Street Station, remain on the Postal Service’s Expanded Access Study List and therefore potentially subject to closure later this year, thought the agency has said it will hold off on shutting any post offices until at least May.
In the press release, Norton argued that “no good case has yet been made for closing any of this city’s busy post offices.” She’s hoping that just as a few years ago, all the District’s mail depots will remain open.
In the mean time, though the T Street post office is losing its current location, it’s not too far a walk to the new spot:
