Six months of snow, rain and gloom of night and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) – in apparent discord with its legendary creed – never delivered. That is, until Wednesday, March 25, when a USPS maintenance crew arrived at the Richmond Hill North Post Office with buckets of pale blue paint in hand.
Richmond Hill residents and activists remember when their local post office was wrapped in a mural with the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa watching over the intersection of Jamaica Avenue and 122nd Street.
“It displayed harmony,” said neighborhood resident Kevin Cook, walking by Richmond Hill North. “Like New York is a melting pot, that’s the way the mural was,” Cook recalled, sweeping his hand across the building’s façade.
Unfortunately, like many New York buildings, the post office eventually became a magnet for graffiti – a canvas for vandals to initial with red, blue and black spray paint. The graffiti, and the mural, were ultimately covered over, only to provide graffitists with a clean wall on which to leave their mark.
But, as Cook strolled by last Wednesday, two USPS maintenance workers were setting out to give the post office a fresh look – albeit six months too late, according to some in the area.
“First we were told it was too cold, then it was on the list to be done. And obviously now it’s being done,” said Richard Dono, an Executive Board member of the Richmond Hill Block Association (RHBA) in charge of graffiti removal and sanitation.
The secret to finally getting the USPS to cover up the curlicues of graffiti, Dono explained, was incessant telephone calls – 9-1-1 handles reports of graffiti in the act and 3-1-1 deals with sightings of fresh graffiti – and the power of the press.
Alerted to the issue by RHBA President Wendy Bowne, The Courier spoke with Jamaica Postmaster Jim Burns and an acting supervisor at Richmond Hill North on Tuesday, March 24, and broke the story the following day.
The USPS promptly dispatched Nadr Naghi and Rudy Xu, both of whom realize it’s a game of cat and mouse between their paint rollers and the spray cans of area vandals.
“Sometimes this happens. You paint a mailbox and after one day you see the same thing – the people come and paint the graffiti,” said Naghi, who has worked maintenance for the USPS for two-and-a-half years. “I hope it doesn’t happen.”
Dono, watching as Naghi and Xu worked their way around the building, was pleased with the clean-up but added that USPS will have to stay on top of things if Richmond Hill North is to have a shot at remaining graffiti-free.
“Once the graffiti comes into the area, sanitation and other illegal things seem to take place,” Dono said. He added that someone will probably tag the post office in the next few months, “but then if you keep going after it, eventually they get tired of it.”
Sherilyn Simmons, the Acting Manager of Richmond Hill North, noted that since police caught a vandal responsible for tagging large swaths of the post office – under state penal law, graffiti charges range from criminal mischief in the fourth to the second degree – she has faith that its walls will remain free of spray-painted scrawl.
“It looks great now. It looks great,” she said, nodding and smiling as the graffiti behind her slowly disappeared behind blue paint. “It brings the area up as opposed to bringing it down.”
In fact, neighborhood residents like Kevin Cook are already dreaming of the freshly painted faces of King and Mother Teresa smiling down at them from a new mural – standing guard through snow, rain, heat and the gloom of night.
