The Lutherville-Timonium Post Office Through the Years

Editor's Note: You can read Part I of this exclusive Then & Now series . 

“The Day of the Move”

It was a Saturday in 1987. All the mail carriers are clear on that.

They’re also pretty sure it was Sept. 23.

Lutherville-Timonium had officially burst at the seams, and the day had come to move the Lutherville post office to its new home—the big, old John Deere building on the eponymous Deereco Road, in Timonium.

The building seemed huge. It covers 197,000 square feet of space. The roof is a pre-cast concrete plank roof and is supported by 1½ inch-thick steel cables, tied to concrete anchors in the back of the building. The result is a swooping, swayback, tent-like structure that has no interior underpinning—it’s entirely supported by the suspension of the cables.

The large, open interior spaces—originally purposed for the free movement of John Deere tractors and industrial farm equipment—were a boon to the beleaguered mail carriers from the cramped Lutherville office.

And the mail carriers were as enchanted with the parking lot as they were with the sprawling interior space. “It was like being introduced to this heaven, all this space,” said Randy Richardson, a Lutherville-Timonium mail carrier who made the move from the old Ridgely Road post office to the new one. “Spaces to park, and for the trucks too.”

Richardson had worked at the old post office location for three years when the move was made. He was hired at the tender age of 24, and learned quickly how crowded, airless and inefficient the small space on Ridgely Road was.

Plus, he was tired of hiding his car.

But now, gone were the mail carriers’ days of surreptitiously slipping their cars into the Giant Food’s parking lot, and hoping they didn’t get a threatening note under their windshield wipers.  Now the parking was abundant, and so was the floor plan.

But there was one sour note.

There were no windows.

Richardson shook his head, remembering the disappointment, mostly on behalf of 1987’s old-timers who had really yearned for some windows. “Before we knew where we were moving, there was one thing a lot of the carriers hoped for. Wherever we’re going, we’re going to have windows! Of course, we moved into Deereco Road … and there are no windows.”

Richardson added dryly, “That was a big joke on a lot of people.”

The move itself was fairly smooth. The mail carriers reported to the Ridgely Road location, just like a normal day. They got their mail out for delivery, just like always. While they were gone, the Von Paris moving company packed up all the mail cases. The movers were careful not to dislodge the painstakingly labeled, subdivided, manual sorting method of sequencing all the thousands of house numbers on every street, represented in each case, by wrapping each mail case in a heavy moving blanket.

Post offices are the temporary repositories of so many secrets: love letters, loss letters, and everything from the most private financial information to the most joyous embossed, glittering announcement cards. Post offices see it all pass through their swift fingers.

Sometimes, a post office unwittingly sits on a secret.

Old mail, lost behind equipment that had been sitting unmoved for decades, was recovered piece by piece. “There was mail that had been hidden, obviously inadvertently,” said Richardson. “It had fallen down between crevices and cracks, fallen under things, and some of those postmarks were years, years in the past. So what do you do? You deliver it. So they were delivered—late.”

Richardson never heard any follow-up stories about the late mail delivery.

At the end of the day’s deliveries, the carriers drove their mail Jeeps to Deereco Road, and came home to the new building for the first time. Since their personal cars were still parked back at Ridgely Road, the post office had kindly arranged shuttles to get them back to the old ground.

The day was not without a snafu. Sometimes, a smooth, expedient move can actually backfire, if it happens too fast. Jeff Davis can tell you.

Davis is a Lutherville-Timonium mail carrier who, like Richardson, has seen his career span both post office buildings. On the day of the move, he found himself with a flat tire while delivering the mail on his route, on Ridgefield Road in Lutherville.

Davis knocked on a neighbor’s door to use the phone to call his supervisor at the post office. Mail carriers don’t carry their own spares (and in 1987 they didn’t carry cell phones, either), so calling a supervisor is protocol whenever there is a problem on the road. Davis dialed the same number he’d dialed any other time in his career, but this time he was greeted with the operator’s recording:

“This number has been disconnected.”

Davis got a ride from a resident of Ridgefield Rd. all the way up to the new building, where everybody had a good laugh at his expense.

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