The good old days of pulling a handle to open a big blue mailbox are long gone in a Bronx neighborhood, and residents aren't happy about the sudden disapperance of the boxes in the middle of the busy mail season.
Chronic mail theft from the box at West 236th Street and Henry Hudson Parkway led the United States Postal Service to yank it and others in the borough. A Riverdale resident who only gave his name as William said he walked out of his apartment to see a slab of concrete where the mailbox normally is.
"Then I noticed, I went to another mailbox in the neighborhood, and that was gone as well," he said. "Something must be going on."
The USPS says it's replacing the old mailboxes across the Bronx with updated ones that have just a single slit for envelopes. Harlem will also soon get those new mailboxes.
The change comes amid a rash of thefts in which people apparently stuck devices into the boxes to grab mail. Three teens were arrested in Harlem Wednesday for the mail theft, police said.
One updated mailbox on Johnson Avenue sits just a few feet from Rep. Eliot Engel's Riverdale office. He praises the fix but says the timing was poor.
In a letter to the Bronx postmaster, he wrote, "Our offices have been flooded with calls from constituents expressing their anger and frustration... Starting a project of this magnitude now was ill-conceived."
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The USPS could not say when all the new mailboxes will be installed. Riverdale resident William hopes it's soon.
"I used to send all my mail through that mailbox, including checks I had to pay," he said.
