Post Office mural repeatedly targeted by vandals

For months, Wendy Bowne would walk by the Richmond Hill North Post Office on 122nd Street and Jamaica Avenue and be disgusted – and disappointed.
As President of the Richmond Hill Block Association (RHBA), Bowne not only sees how the building has become graffiti-strewn, but she also fields complaints from local residents.
“There used to be a really nice mural of famous people on the outside,” she lamented. “But then it got graffitied on, and the graffiti was painted over.”
The exterior walls are now blue, and vandalism mars even that, she said.
“It’s such an eyesore, such a shame,” said Bowne.
After receiving complaints and calling 3-1-1 in December, Bowne was told to call the United States Post Office Consumer Hotline, because it is a federal building. After filing an official complaint, she was given a complaint number.
That same day, Bowne spoke with a branch manager, who was not aware of the vandalism, according to Bowne.
“Nobody seems to notice it,” she said. “She said she’d try to clean it up, but didn’t give a time frame. She didn’t know when it could be done.”
Two weeks later, Bowne noted, nothing had been cleaned.
“They don’t maintain this branch at all,” she said. “The other Richmond Hill Post Office (South) on 101st Avenue gets graffitied and they clean it up immediately. It doesn’t send a good message about what’s going on in Richmond Hill.”
An acting supervisor at the Richmond Hill North branch told The Courier on Tuesday, March 24 that a manager said the Jamaica Postmaster knows about the graffiti.
Protocol requires managers to submit work orders to the Maintenance Department of their main post office (in this case, it would be Jamaica, which serves 18 stations in the 114 zip code). Maintenance crews then address the issue.
Jim Burns, Postmaster, told The Courier that the site has been painted over about five times in the last year, the most recent in January.
But, he said, “I have to know about it in order to fix it.”
“With graffiti, sometimes you paint it and then it gets hit again,” said Burns, who said he visits many of the stations himself and meets monthly with a Customer Advisory Council of elected officials and community leaders to keep abreast of issues.
A police source did concede that it is a graffiti-prone location, but said that the local precinct cannot do a graffiti clean-up because it is a government property.
None of the tags have been identified or linked to known graffitists, he said, noting that there are patrols, but a good deterrent to the vandalism would be surveillance on the property.
“They can put up cameras and that’s all we need – one at one corner and one at the other,” he said.
As for the existing graffiti, Burns told The Courier that he would be sending a crew to paint sometime on Wednesday, March 25.
“We’ll stay on top of that, we will address it more aggressively,” he said, noting that the manager should always call to request a clean-up, since budgetary issues are not a problem.
“If we can’t do it, we’ll contract it out,” he said.
Visit qns.com for updates and to see if the Richmond Hill North Post Office gets cleaned.