Post office likely to stay in Industry City

Last year, customers at the United States Postal Service’s Bush Terminal Station (900 3rd Avenue) – the only USPS location in northern Sunset Park – learned that their post office would soon close. More recently, however, a group of Sunset Park residents discovered that USPS’s plans may have changed.

On August 15, 2018, the Postal Service held a meeting at Community Board 7 to invite public comment on a proposal to move Bush Terminal Station from its space in Industry City – the waterfront complex redeveloped, starting in 2013, by a real estate consortium led by Jamestown Properties – to “a yet-to-be-determined location as close as reasonably possible to the current location.” Subsequently, USPS posted a public notice in the lobby of 900 3rd Avenue, declaring the decision to relocate “final.”

According to the announcement, the “Postal Service must relocate because its landlord at its current facility will not enter into a new long-term lease.” The notice added that services at Bush Terminal Station would continue “until the replacement facility is open and operating as a Post Office.” USPS has had operations in Industry City – first known as Bush Terminal – since the early 20th century.

The community group Protect Sunset Park pressed U.S. Representative Nydia Velázquez to intervene and prevent what, according to local activist Jorge Muniz, amounted to a developer’s profit-driven attempt to “evict the federal government” from an increasingly valuable piece of commercial real estate. At the same time, Industry City was formulating a request to the city for a rezoning that would add more retail businesses and offices to its 35-acre campus, originally built for manufacturing – the latter negotiation remains ongoing.

Velázquez inquired into the matter of Industry City and the Postal Service. The congresswoman found that, contrary to USPS’s earlier dispatches, the two parties apparently had found – seemingly at the last moment – a mutually agreeable path forward.

“We learned from the community last year that USPS was encountering difficulty renewing their lease at the facility and could be closing,” Velázquez said. “Obviously, we found this disturbing. My staff reached out to both USPS and Industry City and since then we have been relieved to find out that the facility will remain open.”

USPS expects to confirm the good news in the near future, but per spokesperson Amy Bolger, the lease renewal has not quite been finalized. “However, the Postal Service looks forward to a resolution shortly,” she reported.

Because the new agreement doesn’t yet bear signatures, Bolger couldn’t offer any details, like the length of the proposed tenancy. But she mentioned a possibility that the prospective lease could restructure Bush Terminal Station as a retail-only location. Currently, 900 3rd Avenue houses not only a counter where customers drop off packages and buy stamps but also, in back, a sortation warehouse where workers load and unload trucks from mail processing plants.

As of November 25, USPS appeared to have not yet informed its employees at Bush Terminal Station – who have anticipated its closing for more than a year – that at least some of them will likely stay on at 3rd Avenue. A worker at the customer service window said he hadn’t heard anything new regarding the relocation plan.

By his account, the dispute between Industry City and USPS owed to the considerable size of the post office – in other words, from the landlord’s perspective, it takes up too much space within a section of the complex that, thanks to Industry City’s reinvention by Jamestown, has become a sought-after destination for shopping and dining. While USPS could probably afford the market rent for a spacious facility on 2nd or 1st Avenue – indeed, it already rents another warehouse at 101 44th Street, nearer to New York Harbor – such a move would inconvenience its customers, who live on the opposite side of I-278.

Splitting up Bush Terminal Station’s operations, with a retail counter on 3rd Avenue and loading bays elsewhere, would presumably shrink USPS’s footprint on Industry City’s front end without putting a new burden on Sunset Park residents. USPS itself, it seems, would bear any inefficiency imposed by the arrangement.

“We continue to have constructive conversations with USPS and are optimistic there will be a positive outcome,” an Industry City spokesperson stated.

Brett Yates