The United States Postal Service recently closed the post office on Fifth Street in Downtown and opened its replacement on Seventh Street, just off Colorado Avenue.
So, this week Q-Line asked:
What are your early impressions of the new location? Is it a suitable replacement?
Here are your responses:
"The hours they're open are not listed. When you ask the employees, the employees don't know the hours or give you conflicting answers. Also the employees don't even know the phone number for that location on Seventh Street. There's no clock once you're inside and you have to get in line to get the free envelopes, like priority that sort of thing, where we used to be able to pick them up for yourself. Now, all those things could eventually be corrected. That I understand. One thing that cannot be corrected is the diagonal parking where when you pull out it's very dangerous because you can't see cars that are coming both south of you and north of you."
"I think it's utterly dastardly that the post office was moved from that central location. I'm now disabled so that makes it really hard. So no, I don't think it's a suitable replacement at all."
"The problem with the new location of the post office and mail boxes is this location is just one block from the Ocean Park Community Center's (OPCC) Homeless Service Center and homeless shelter. The SMRR-controlled City Council bought the former trailer park at Fifth Street, evicted the tenants, and then gave money to OPCC to build the homeless shelter. This location is a magnet for Southern California's homeless to move to Santa Monica. The homeless there were not evicted from an apartment in Santa Monica or homeless due to losing a Santa Monica home to foreclosure. They moved here from some place else. Based on the arrest reports by the Santa Monica Police Department, the police blotter published in this paper and other papers the homeless are responsible for a lot of the crime in Santa Monica and surrounding areas. The person arrested for the Venice Boardwalk tragedy is a homeless person who moved here from Colorado. Many people I speak with are afraid to go to the new post office due to the proximity of the OPCC facilities at Fifth and Olympic."
"Absolutely nothing that the U.S. Postal Service can do in Washington D.C. can compensate for their policies of closing down or selling off beautiful, old, historic and architecturally desirable WPA-built post offices, not just in Santa Monica but around L.A. and California and across the country. It's a shame that they've been able to get away with closing down or selling off those beautiful pieces of architecture."
"It was an enormous error to shutter our historic Downtown post office. It was very convenient to use for most people while shopping downtown. Perhaps it is just another effort to weaken and destroy our present fine postal service."
"I participated in the post office outreach meeting, which brought 120 residents and business people together to express outrage over the loss of the centrally located post office. With the opening of the Seventh Street branch, I can tell you, symbolically, that our political representation is as barren and as removed as that location. No one from the city, not even the usually reliable Councilmember Kevin McKeown, showed up in support of our concerns, and no one from Congressman Waxman's office even bothered to attend to monitor the proceedings. On Tuesday, I passed Colorado and Seventh, and Colorado is now being torn up for the Expo Line tracks. As predicted at the meeting, the only access to the Seventh Street office will be westbound on Olympic, parallel to the freeway. Good luck trying to reach it, if you must. Thanks to our politicians, we now have two unusable post office branches — the Ocean Park Community Center branch at Seventh and Olympic, apparently now exclusively designated for the use of the homeless; and the cramped, cubbyhole called the Will Rogers Branch on Wilshire, where lines typically spill out the door. Last year, I suggested to the City Manager's Office that a small post office substation be built in the dead zone behind the Main Public Library. That location is one of the community's last true gathering places. Do you see it built? I don't"
"They never picked up. I called many times. They left me on hold for a long time. And the closed post office was doing a profit. I don't know if anyone knows that. It's like a dictatorship of the proletariat. If put to an election it would have failed, they would not have closed it. … The customer serve there sucks. It's unbelievable what it is. A disgrace. It's too bad the old one closed. It was doing well. If these people do bad, can they be fired?"
"I made a trip to the post office by bus yesterday, or rather tried to. By the time the bus had skirted the roadwork and permitted me to get off, I found I had to walk farther than had I walked directly from my home. I shall never go to that post office again."
editor@www.smdp.com
