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.

The gigantic Central Post Office in Helsinki/Helsingfors was built in 1938 in accordance with functionalist principles. In other words, it may not have been pretty, but it worked. Today, the building contains a branch post office and a few shops, but is being redeveloped to offer various additional attractions.

Here it is in 1942, engraved by Arthur Schuricht. It's so huge and impressive that the top of the frame can't contain it!



And here's a site describing how it's being adapted today.

https://postitalo.fi/en/

This was the circa 1875 Boston Post Office Building located in Post Office Square which was demolished in 1929:




It was replaced by this Art Deco structure in 1933, the John W McCormack Post Office and Courthouse, which covers an entire city block:

I wasn't even thinking when I started this thread, but NSK reminded me. The central Post Office, or Posthuset, in Gothenburg, Sweden was built in 1925 and served as that city's main PO for several decades. It eventually closed, and in 2012 opened as the Clarion Post Hotel. I have stayed there several times and it is a magnificent hotel, and from the pictures posted in some of its hallways must have been an impressive building in its earlier days. One of its most interesting decorative features is in the 3-story high atrium just off the reception area. Above the elevator bank is an old post office van, cut into its various body sections pounded flat and then mounted against the wall, as a reminder of its former use as a governmental building.

This is Tintagel Old Post Office, Cornwall (photo from Wikipedia). A 14th-century Manor House, used briefly as a post office in the 1870s, acquired by the National Trust in 1908 and now restored as a non-functioning post office.

I guess the answer to the question is that the cows moved back in when the post office closed. Half the building was originally a shippen- a domicile for farm animals.