Post office reprieve

Because it makes all the sense in the world for Raleigh to have a post office branch located in its downtown core, there is much to like about postal officials' decision to delay the planned closing of the historic Century Station. What needs to happen after the ongoing review is for the facility to be kept open, permanently.

The U.S. Postal Service is understandably in a cost-cutting mode, and the post office located in the old federal courthouse at Martin and Fayetteville Streets was placed on the budgetary chopping block along with several others around the city. One reason cited, along with declining business, was inconvenient parking both for delivery vehicles and customers.

Parking has been cramped - not surprisingly for a facility on a busy downtown street corner with no space for a suburban-type lot. But the problem has City Hall's attention, as it should. Eight 15-minute (metered) spaces now are provided close by, and access to a rear loading area is being improved.

Still, this post office will never succeed on the basis of people who drive to get there. It is a place whose natural market consists of walkers - people who work in the office buildings clustered along Fayetteville Street and increasingly people who live downtown (the RBC Plaza's high-rise condos, for instance, are just across Fayetteville).

Convenient access to a post office may have been taken for granted before the Postal Service first announced that it planned to close Century Station as of today. But then the campaign to keep the branch open began. City officials weighed in, and the Downtown Raleigh Alliance urged members to "use it or lose it." Good advice.

This handsome post office, the first constructed in the South after the Civil War (and housed in the first such federal building), is worth saving on many counts. The Postal Service deserves credit for giving those reasons another look.