Sound Beach post office closed for months, with no signs of progress

For residents of the hamlet of Sound Beach, on Brookhaven’s North Shore, the squat brick post office near the center of town was both landmark and meeting place, and its closure early this summer because of structural problems was met with dismay. 

Months later, it has not reopened and neighbors say there have been few signs of work, leaving them — and their elected representatives — baffled and frustrated. 

“There was just a sign one day, and they were closed” around Memorial Day, said Jane Bonner, a Republican and the Brookhaven Town Council member for the area. “Oddly enough, there’s still a drop box outside where people drop their mail, but they’re not picking up their garbage, and the garbage can is overflowing.” 

The New York Avenue building appears on a list of about 200 locations that the United States Postal Service leases on Long Island. USPS spokesman Paul Smith declined an interview request and did not answer a list of emailed questions, but wrote in a statement that the Sound Beach Post Office “remains closed awaiting necessary repairs” and that USPS will “continue to work with the building’s owner.”

Staff are working out of the nearby Miller Place post office, and home delivery times have not been affected, he wrote. In a subsequent email, he wrote that customers are encouraged to call a USPS 800 number "so we can look into any issues they may have."

In 2020, the Pew Research Center found that 91% of Americans had a favorable opinion of the USPS. Democrats, Republicans, Americans as a whole have greater esteem for it than almost any other government agency. But it has "long faced financial challenges that threaten its ability to deliver your mail and pay retirees' benefits," the U.S. Government Accountability Office wrote in August, citing falling volume of profitable First Class mail and 15 years of increasing debt and unfunded liabilities. 

Signs in the windows of the Sound Beach post office this week said the location was temporarily closed “due to safety concerns.” A 40-foot section of walkway under the building’s brick facade was blocked off with chicken wire and yellow caution tape. Garbage had accumulated outside the front door.

According to state records, a Brooklyn company, Sixteen Broadway Corp., owns the building. Company CEO Israel Frankel did not make himself available for an interview. 

Post office box customers among most affected

Sound Beach is less than two square miles, with a population of 7,289, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Among those most affected by the closure are post office box customers. Bonner said they are prevalent because many homes in her district have curb or centralized mailboxes that can be difficult to reach. Sound Beach post office box customers are being served at a dedicated window at the Miller Place post office, about two miles away, a solution some find unsatisfying.

Earlier this summer, temperature-sensitive diabetes medicine bound for James Weber, a disabled Vietnam War veteran accustomed to picking it up at the Sound Beach post office, was returned as undeliverable to the Department of Veterans Affairs, he said. 

And, for part of at least one day last week, some customers said, the dedicated window at Miller Place was closed. Inge Goldstein, a retired banker, said she went at 11 a.m. only to see a sign that said “short staffed will open at 12 noon.” In an email, Smith, the USPS spokesman, wrote that "It is my understanding staffing is currently not an issue."

Goldstein made a needless extra trip, but it wasn’t only the inconvenience that bothered her. “How can a village, a hamlet, be without its own post office?” she said.

For years, when the weather was good, she walked to the old post office. “You see somebody you haven’t seen in a long time, you stop and talk,” she said. She brought Christmas cookies to the workers.

“We love our post office,” said Ginny Drews, a semiretired nurse who works one day a week at a local convent, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. For a small community, split down the middle by the Rocky Point and Miller Place school districts, “It’s a big part of our identity. … In many ways, it’s a gathering place.” 

Bea Ruberto, president of the Sound Beach Civic Association, which also rented a post office box in Sound Beach, said she’d gotten about a dozen complaints about the closure. “We weren’t able to get any kind of information” from the USPS, she said, and when she asked at Miller Place for the Sound Beach postmaster, she was told “in a very snippy way” to come back another day. 

Postal Service 'doing away with career positions'

Peter Furgiuele, president of the American Postal Workers Union Long Island New York Area Local 3251, which represents clerks, maintenance, motor vehicle and support service workers at 184 USPS locations on Long Island, said he was not specifically familiar with the incidents Goldstein and Ruberto described.

But for years, he said, USPS had been “doing away with career positions, and that has left a lot of offices shorthanded.” As long as there were workers in the Miller Place post office, Goldstein “should not have been turned away,” he said. 

On Long Island, Furgiuele said, his union has lost 600 members over the last decade, and management "refuses to refill a vast majority" of the positions.  

USPS has roughly 633,000 employees, and in a report to Congress last fall, the Inspector General identified staffing as one of the "critical operational challenges" the service faces. Hiring and retaining for 116,500 temporary non-career employees who perform clerical duties and collect and deliver mail is an issue of particular concern. An April OIG report put turnover for those workers for fiscal 2022 at 58.9%.   

USPS had an on-time rate of 90.3% for delivering first-class mail on Long Island in the third quarter of this year, below the 93% target, according to a website maintained by the OIG. Package services were 92.4% on time, above the 90% target. 

Earlier this summer, residents’ complaints, including Weber’s tale, made it to the office of Rep. Nick LaLota (R-Amityville), the congressman who represents the area. The snafu with Weber's medicine was a “completely unacceptable failure,” he wrote in an Aug. 8 letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. “To further complicate matters, it has come to my attention that the USPS does not have a timeline in place to reopen the Sound Beach Post Office,” LaLota wrote.

In an emailed statement, LaLota said: “I’m incredibly disappointed we have yet to receive ANY resolution from USPS related to the issues at Sound Beach. It is completely unacceptable our outreach has been ignored and the residents of Sound Beach have been hung out to dry.”

Weber said he’d worked many jobs after the Army — newspaper photographer in Puerto Rico, UPS driver, postal worker in the Bronx, merchant seaman and deckhand on a New York City vessel that took convicts to work the potter’s field at Hart Island. He was savvy enough to keep extra medicine on hand, so his health was not immediately endangered by the non-delivery. 

But he is 76, with neuropathy and not eager to drive more than he must, so the incident was “the straw that broke the camel’s back." He’s decided to get rid of the box he’d rented for 40-odd years and to use home delivery instead. 

He will miss the people he saw on his regular visits, he said. He’d gone to one postal worker’s retirement party. “I’ll miss the meeting and the greeting, the banter,” he said. “Everything was on a first-name basis. There’s a social part to it … a crossing of paths.” 

Bonner, the Brookhaven councilwoman, said this week that no town permits had been pulled for “restoration, renovation, construction or anything” at the Sound Beach post office. “We did not condemn it and we did not close it,” she said.

If the building owner approached the town, “We would work to expedite all their permits,” but the owner has not, she said. “The mystery continues."