One By One, They’re Taking Away Everything

And soon there will be nothing left:

The way Vincent Sapone sees it, the Staten Island postmark is bit like the “Made in the U.S.A.” label.

“It’s a point of pride,” said Sapone, a 28-year employee of the U.S. Postal Service.

So when Sapone — chief steward for mail handlers at the Manor Road Post Office in Castleton Corners — heard talk that bigwigs are weighing whether to shut down the facility’s outgoing mail processing service as a cost-cutting measure, the first thing he thought of was the postmark.

And the fact that it might not be around much longer. That’s because the Postal Service is in the midst of a five-month study to see whether consolidating the processing of outgoing Staten Island mail with that of Brooklyn and Queens would make sense from an economic standpoint.

Which would mean mailing a letter on Staten Island, having it taken by mail truck over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to have it processed and postmarked, and then having Staten Island-addressed mail brought back over the bridge to be distributed here.

“No offense,” said Sapone, who resides in Westerleigh, “but we don’t live in Queens or Brooklyn, and that’s what the postmark would say.”