Neither Snow, Rain, nor Gloom, but What About the Stoop?

By ANNIE KARNI, Special to the Sun
September 29, 2006

Neither snow, rain, nor gloom of night will stop letter carriers from completing their rounds. But brownstone stoops in Brooklyn? Well, that's a different story.

The residents are complaining that mail carriers have been dumping letters by their garden gates rather than making their way up the brownstone steps.

Letters, catalogs, and magazines delivered to certain streets in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill have been rained upon, blown away, and destroyed. Some residents who filed official complaints with the postmaster found that their mail stopped coming around at all for several days.

Postal workers complain that trekking up the steps is treacherous business, especially in the ice and snow.

When the sidewalk mailbox belonging to Elizabeth Juviler, a real estate agent in Bedford-Stuyvesant, recently fell off, her attempts to replace it with a box inside her foyer failed because her letter carrier refused to use it.

"Our mailman said he didn't climb stoops," Ms. Juviler said.

The postal carrier's insistence on having the mailbox come to him rather than tackle the stairs could hint at the future of city "snail mail." Under the current policy, residents cannot change their delivery points, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service, Tom Gaynor, explained.

Some residents on a leafy stretch of Adelphi Street in Fort Greene have erected signs asking their letter carriers not to dump their mail underneath their stoops.

"Dear Letter Carrier: No mail here please. Key-keeper and boxes are upstairs. Thank you," one of the signs reads.

The U.S. Postal Service wants the ongoing tiffs between brownstone residents and their letter carriers to soon be a thing of the past. The Postal Service is attempting to phase out door delivery in Brooklyn and other cities across the country.

Mr. Gaynor said door delivery service is costly and inefficient. Instead, he said, the Postal Service is pushing for group mailboxes, known as "cluster boxes," that catch the mail for multiple tenants.

Ultimately, the decision about where to leave the mail is up to local post offices. Delivery options are "based on what local postal management works out with builders," Mr. Gaynor said.

The executive vice president of the Brooklyn branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Joe DeRossi, declined to comment on whether postal workers should have to walk up stoops.

As part of the move to phase out stoop service, when new residents move in to a brownstone they are not guaranteed mail delivery to the top of the stoop, according to a customer service agent at the Postal Service.

In contrast, private mail delivery companies such as UPS and FedEx leave the decision of where to drop a package up to the driver's discretion unless the sender has indicated that they require a signature.

The same rules will also apply to Manhattan, although community boards representing the upper east and upper west sides said that they haven't fielded any complaints.

A brownstone dweller on the Upper West Side, Jennifer Miller, who works in commercial real estate, said she preferred having the mail left at curbside. She said it created "easier access for the mailman — and I don't have to worry about my gate being left open."

The mail delivery problem in Brooklyn has become so endemic that Rep. Edolphus Towns, whose district includes Bedford-Stuyvesant, as well as parts of Fort Greene and Williamsburg, plans to put postal problems on top of his agenda — above Social Security and the war in Iraq — when he hosts his next round of Town Hall meetings in 2007, according to a spokeswoman, Karen Johnson.

Residents in Brooklyn said the problem is aggravated by the large number of substitute carriers unfamiliar with routes and delivery points.

"We never have the same mailman," a Fort Greene resident who lives in a brownstone apartment, Teresa Stern, said. "So, it just seems like no one particularly cares."