GB Triangular Postmarks

Thank you Chris.

That was my initial suspicion, which prompted the query.
I could not understand how a letter could be addressed to a Curb Market, even if it was in a building, believing there would not be a reliable address for any of the vendors there.
It was certainly curious.

Here in Western Australia we call them "swap meets"
and usually held in car parks.

New Curb Street Market Building, Greenville South Carolina 1950
Source "remembering Greenville"

"Curb Market " to a commodity trader like myself , it is a market place to trade smaller lots and it can also mean a place to trade after hours . They also began as a place that was unregulated by regulators . The last Curb Market in the U.S. was the MID-AMERICA COMMODITY EXCHANGE,they became regulated around 1969 or 1970.

It was a trading place with a lot less rules and you had to know who you were dealing with and making trades ,the government closed a lot of them down after too many traders were defaulting on their trade committments .

"Curb" came about after trading hours and the Exchanges closed then traders went outside and stood at the curb to trade .

rod wrote:


You will find a fair amount of US mail addressed like this to a business in a commercial building, even without specific office numbers. This changed at some point but the cover shows that the practice continued to at least the 1950s. There were fewer such buildings back then and some very knowledgeable postal workers. This was tolerated even in the largest cities. The pencil notation might be to either specify an office number or PO box number.

This parallels the British practice where if you had a named residence, e.g. "The Willows", it was sufficient to get the mail there, with or without post code. I remember this practice being done up to the late 1960s at least, when I was buying stamps.

Postcodes weren't introduced in the UK until the mid-1960s/mid-1970s, although cities had postal districts before that. Postmen/women had to know their route, which was helped by the fact that, in those days, the same person delivered the post every day, at around the same time, so they also got to know the residents.

The cover also appears to have a pencil notation "B 1325" which could be an office within the building and could have been applied by an office clerk of the building for routing inside.

There is always someone with sharper eyes
Thank you.