"In essence," he said, "they told me to go look around, 10 blocks one way, 10 blocks the other. Maybe that's good for my heart but not for my attitude. . . . They didn't make an effort at all to mitigate the pain."
Meltzer said the nearest post office is 12 blocks from his residence.
The number of mailboxes nationwide has dropped to 187,000 from about 204,000 in September 2007, said Don Smeraldi, a spokesman for the postal service's Pacific area, which includes California and Hawaii.
Spurring the removals has been a profound shift in how people communicate. E-mail and social networking Internet sites have contributed to steep declines in paper mail. The biggest reduction, Smeraldi said, has been in single-piece, first-class mail.
Complaints about mailbox removals have spread around the region, including Orange County and parts of Southeast L.A.
In Lakewood three years ago, residents in one neighborhood successfully lobbied to get their blue box back, arguing that it was a community meeting place.
Jonathan Weiss, a Cheviot Hills resident, said he had filed under the federal Freedom of Information Act a request for information about the postal service's collection surveys conducted in his neighborhood. All five mailboxes closest to him, many used by elderly neighbors who still prefer paying bills by mail, were taken out, Weiss said.
"They removed every single one in my neighborhood, instead of taking out half of them," he said. "I think it makes no sense."
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martha.groves@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Vanishing mailboxes
The number of U.S. mail-collection boxes has declined sharply in the last decade:
1999: 337,000
2005: 295,050
2007: 204,342
March 2009: 187,000
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Source: U.S. Postal Services
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Los Angeles Times
