What Happens To Old Post Offices When They Close?

As fewer and fewer people use the mail to send letters and fewer and fewer companies send out actual physical mail, there are many actual Post Offices that close down, often, never to be replaced. I have personal knowledge of a few in neighborhoods that I have lived in, or currently live in, and a couple where I either worked or have family members that live nearby. One that is just around the corner from where I live now, was a small, sub-post office that operated out of the back of a drug store which closed a few years ago and is now a dental clinic. Another nearby sub office is now a convenience store. One where I used to work in Southeast London is now a florist shop, And one in a small village in South Wales where a niece and nephew live is closed and boarded up. This one closed some time between a visit in about 2012 when I was still able to buy a few Presentation Packs of current British stamps , and a subsequent visit in about 2019 when it had closed. Possibly the most famous one that I know of is immortalized in philatelic lore because it is actually mentioned in the Stanley Gibbons Great Britain Concise Catalogue. It was where, in 1935, three of four sheets of the 2 1/2 d blue Silver Jubilee commemorative stamps, accidentally printed in Prussian blue were sold to lucky purchasers. Stanley Gibbons gives the address of the Post Office as 134 Fore Street, Upper Edmonton, in North London. According to Google Maps, the location is now a Maxmo fried chicken takeout. I wonder if other members of the forum have their own examples.

We haven't had post offices for over a decade. The one in my home town was a modern construction and made place for housing. In larger towns and cities, there were monumental post office buildings. Some have been refurbished.

Amsterdam's main post office was built between 1895 and 1899. It stands behind the Royal Palace that stands on Dam Square. It was refurbished and has become a shopping mall named Magna Plaza.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Plaza

In Austin, Texas, the century-old, magnificent colonnaded downtown office was recently purchased by an investor group led by the entertainer Justin Timberlake and is being transformed into the second location of his restaurant-bar-club concept The 1230 Club. The first is in Nashville. They are reportedly sinking $30 million into it. The entire facade is being preserved. Rather than walling off the site with plywood, they installed viewports so passersby can see the ongoing interior construction, which is impressive. I check on it periodically when downtown.

In Washington DC, most of the main office adjacent to Union Station became the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. A portion downstairs still provides consumer postal services and stamp sales.

On the flip side, my hometown office in Los Altos, California on First Street was razed and the site redeveloped as luxury condominiums. But with the price of land there averaging $4-10 million per acre, it was the right decision for the government. They reopened a smaller office in a retail storefront block on Main Street.