{"id":409,"date":"2011-09-15T01:18:16","date_gmt":"2011-09-15T06:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=409"},"modified":"2011-09-15T01:18:16","modified_gmt":"2011-09-15T06:18:16","slug":"recently-built-post-offices-on-the-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2011\/09\/recently-built-post-offices-on-the-list\/","title":{"rendered":"Recently built post offices on The List"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went on a trip to southern Iowa Tuesday in an attempt to clear my head from all of the conference talk and in search of something about as random and uncertain: Iowa post offices targeted for closure.<\/p>\n

One of my early stops was Weldon, on the Clarke\/Decatur county line, formerly on IA 266<\/a>. The community center was open for the school board election. I inquired about the location of the post office.<\/p>\n

“The old one, or the new one?” The question took me by surprise.<\/p>\n

And sure enough, here’s Weldon’s new post office. (The old one, a lonesome building in a lonesome downtown, still had the ZIP code painted on the window.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Weldon post office looks remarkably like the one in Davis City, 21 miles away and five miles from the Missouri state line:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Which looks remarkably like the one in Scarville, two miles from the Minnesota<\/em> state line:<\/p>\n

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It looks pretty obvious that for some period the USPS had a utilitarian “cookie-cutter” design that was used in small towns. And that period was…the 1990s.<\/p>\n

All three of these were built between mid-1994 and mid-2002, as shown in aerial photos of those times. There are other post offices built specifically as post offices on The List, too, like Mystic.<\/p>\n

So, completely randomly, I have found three buildings on opposite sides of the state that are less than 20 years old – probably less than 15 – that the USPS built and now wants to get rid of. How many others are in an identical situation?<\/p>\n

(By the way, just after I took that photo in Davis City, a UPS truck and another customer pulled up.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went on a trip to southern Iowa Tuesday in an attempt to clear my head from all of the conference talk and in search of something about as random and uncertain: Iowa post offices targeted for closure. One of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-offices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":413,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions\/413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}