Here’s Why Mailboxes Are Going Missing on the UES

Within a five-block area of Yorkville, mailboxes are disappearing. The set of boxes in front of the East 85th Street Post Office is gone, as is the box that stood for 50 years at the corner of East 88th Street and York Avenue.

Upper East Side resident Frank Wilkinson, upset at the change, brought the issue to the attention of a reporter from Our Town in an email. It reads in part, “After over 50 years, the mailbox at E. 88th St. & York Ave. has vanished. And so have the mailboxes in front of the E. 85th Street Post Office.”

A reporter from Our Town went to the sites of the missing mailboxes and confirmed that they are indeed gone. In front of the post office, only the drilled holes and rust stains remain. Over on East 88th Street, the box is simply gone, the spot where it stood for 50 years already filled in with new concrete.

As Alan Flacks, a longtime Upper West Side resident and amateur mail-service historian, puts it, “Something is not right here.” Flack has been taking the pulse of mail service in the city for decades and takes issue with boxes being removed. He notes how, years ago, he was part of a group who campaigned for more postal boxes on the city streets. The idea was to increase access for New Yorkers to the then-vital postal service.

“We, the people, fought to get more boxes in,” Flack said.

The “why” of the missing mailboxes is simple: for the safety of the mail. The boxes in question “were removed due to vandalism/theft concerns and not slated to be replaced,” Steve Doherty, USPS corporate communications specialist, wrote in an email to Our Town. “It was determined that the availability of other boxes within a short walking distance minimized any impact to the community.”

Doherty’s statement is backed up by the official guidelines from the USPS regarding box security. “In specific locations where a blue box is a repeated crime target and/or mail density is very low, collection boxes may have to be removed entirely when access is not meaningfully diminished due to nearby access points.”

Flacks was unconvinced and shared his thoughts and feelings. “I would ask them for facts and proof,” he told Our Town. “These are merely allegations.”

The removal of boxes is in line with the USPS’s Project Safe Delivery, which it launched in May 2023. Among other goals of the project is the nationwide replacement of existing blue mailboxes with “high security blue collection boxes.” The project aims to create 10,000 throughout the country and “anticipates several thousand more in the near future.”

Another of Flacks’ concerns about theft comes from the use of arrow keys, the special keys used to unlock boxes for package deliveries. He references an incident in which an acquaintance was robbed at gunpoint, not for his money, but for his arrow keys. This, too, is an issue that Project Safe Delivery seeks to fix. The project hopes to create 49,000 electronic locks to reduce the theft of keys from postal employees and citizens.

The removals on the UES are not new in New York. Across the city, boxes have been disappearing in recent years. In the Castleton Corners neighborhood of Staten Island, the removal of a drive-through mailbox at the Manor Road Post Office caused a public uproar. Officially closed due to issues of theft, vandalism, and instances of check fraud, the closure was protested by the community as well as numerous local politicians.

The mailbox did not return, nor does the Post Office have plans to replace the boxes it took away on the UES.