The Lutherville-Timonium Post Office Through the Years

“Plenty of Room in the New Place!”

In the cramped and crowded old Lutherville-Timonium Post Office in 1985, the mail carriers developed a catch phrase. Every time they bumped into each other or knocked something over—an increasingly common event—they’d say, "Plenty of room in the new place!”

The “new place” was a yet-to-be determined building where they’d have plenty of room to do their jobs. In 1985, the working conditions were beginning to feel sardine-like, and everyone knew a move was imminent. Lutherville and Timonium neighborhoods had developed rapidly into growing suburbs since 1957, when the post office building on Ridgely Road was built.

The building was no longer adequate to house all the mail, equipment and employees. It was so crowded inside, the clerks were processing mail outside on the loading dock. At night, when the post office closed, all the equipment had to be moved inside the building, and it took up every available inch of space. Early in the mornings, before the mail carriers arrived, the equipment had to be moved outside again.

Randy Richardson, a Lutherville-Timonium mail carrier, remembers the squeeze well.

“They did it outside in all kinds of weather,” he said. “We had an overhang, but in January and February, it was pretty cold.  So you had clerks out there processing mail in their coats, because there wasn’t any room inside when the carriers were in there.”

Parking was a problem, too. Customers often parked at the supermarkets nearby and walked, but the mail carriers had to abandon their cars in the adjacent neighborhoods for the day and walk even farther.

Richardson remembers parking as "an absolute nightmare."

“It was bad enough for the customers, but we weren’t allowed to even park in the shopping center parking lots. There wasn’t any space," he said. "We had to be very creative about how and where we parked.”

The old post office did sport one convenience for the mail carriers: a single gas pump for the Jeeps. Back then, the mail carriers drove Jeep trucks instead of the larger mail trucks we see today. The Jeeps were small, built for shorter delivery routes through neighborhoods that had not yet expanded.

Lots of things were built smaller, including, unfortunately, the post office’s windows. Tiny and placed up high, they did not allow much natural light or air inside.

“It was always very dark and dreary in there,” recalled Richardson. “The windows seemed like they hadn’t been washed in decades. So not only were the windows very small, but they were very dirty, and had no air flow.”

The mail carriers and clerks alike dreamed of a new building with lots of light, good ventilation, and, as they continued to say to each other as they bumped elbows and banged hips, “plenty of room in the new place.”

But the litany of problems continued.

The roof leaked.

“The roof leaked all the time,” Richardson said.

But he has a good memory, too, of the mail carriers' enterprising nature.

“Back then,” he continued, “the carriers went up to the roof themselves and tried to fix the roof leaks. They’d take tar up there, and they’d try to patch it up.”

The mail carriers weren’t taking matters into their own hands because of a lack of government funding or maintenance work. They were simply from a genteel, working-man’s era—a time we might call the “have problem, will fix” era.

“It was just expedient that way,” said Richardson. “There was a leak, so let’s get up there and fix it.”

George Harvey is a mail carrier who took the do-it-yourself philosophy to heart.

Harvey worked at the Lutherville-Timonium Post Office starting in 1966, and he still delivers mail today. His favorite memory of the old post office was returning from his deliveries and finding a female clerk, standing on top of a chair, screaming.

“Of course, it must be a mouse,” he said to himself, assuming that he was witnessing a girlish stereotype playing out before his eyes.

But no.

A box of baby alligators had split open, and they were crawling all over the floor. After he recovered from his shock, Harvey took it upon himself to collect the baby alligators, repackage them, and get them delivered to their Lutherville address. It was a house on Shetland Hills Road, to be exact—Harvey will always remember the street.

And so will the rest of us, who wonder like Harvey did: What happened when those baby alligators grew up?

Click to read Part II of the Lutherville-Timonium Post Office series.