The blue mailbox on duty on a busy Manhattan corner looked forlorn the other day, streaked with spray paint and covered with stickers. A flier taped across it advertised a rally to save postal service jobs.

“It’s in bad condition,” said Lorrie Goulet, as she approached it with a letter and two bills. Although Goulet, 86, has been loyal to this particular mailbox on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street since 1962, even she’s starting to wonder about the decrepit condition.  “When they can’t take care of it, maybe they’re that way with my mail,” she said.

Though the surrounding neighborhood of Chelsea has turned tony in recent years, the mailbox looks like it might topple from its four rusting legs. Still, “what’s the alternative?” Goulet asked, opening the hinged door and dropping her mail into the darkness.

A U.S. Postal Service mailbox at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street in Manhattan. The boxes, a symbol of American street corners for nearly a century, are disappearing. (Photo by Brian Browdie/CNS)

It seems like only yesterday when Americans had a loyal relationship with the blue mailbox on the corner.  For nearly a century, the benevolent bins collected our correspondence, bills and birthday cards to Grandma. But thanks to the Internet, the once-reliable street corner symbols of America are disappearing at a remarkable pace, as email, electronic bill paying and other forms of electronic communication elbow snail mail aside.

“I wonder whether my letters will actually get picked up,” said Burt Schein, 60, another New York City resident.

Fewer than half the mailboxes that stood on U.S. streets a decade ago are still in service.  The 170,000 that remain suffer their share of indignities.  “People spray paint on the boxes, dogs pee on them,” said Kelly Santos, a letter carrier in New York.  “Inside, it’s clean,” he added.

Across America, it’s the same story. In Pittsburgh, a blue mailbox in the  Squirrel Hill section drips with rust and graffiti.   “Ahem,” reads a message someone has spray-painted in pink on another about two miles away.  And in Dwale, Ky., “Occasionally, the mailboxes get spray painted or hit by cars,” said Daniel Hopkins, acting postmaster.

People just don’t seem to need them any more. Before the Super Bowl in Indianapolis, the Postal Service removed blue mailboxes along South Capitol Avenue near Lucas Oil Stadium so fans wouldn’t use them as trash cans or plant explosives in them, according to spokeswoman Mary Dando.

The decrease in mailboxes is an inevitable result of a 30 percent decline in first-class mail, down from 104 billion pieces in 2000 to 74 billion pieces last year.  The composition of mail is changing, too.  Neighborhood mail carriers say mailboxes tend to have Netflix DVDs in them on Mondays, along with the bills that some people still refuse to pay online.

If a mailbox receives fewer than 25 letters a day for 30 straight days, it becomes a candidate for removal.  “We look at a number of factors,” including whether senior citizens use the mailbox, said Connie Chirichello, a U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman.  The Postal Service will put a mailbox back if it later realizes seniors depended on it, or if elected officials weigh in on its behalf.

Chirichello says the postal service removes and refurbishes boxes if people complain or letter carriers notice a problem.  After refurbishing, “you would never know it was dirty or run down,” said Chirichello.  “We’ve used the same mailboxes for more than 20 years.”  Chirichello says the postal service keeps a supply of extra mailboxes in processing plants around the country.

It wasn’t always like nowadays. From the advent of the postage stamp in 1847 until about 1913, the postal service attached collection boxes to lampposts.  The service later moved them to sidewalks as mail volume increased and packages grew heavier.

After World War II, the bins’ color changed from dark green to navy blue with a dark red top.  In the early 1970s, mailboxes became the blue we know today.  “The mailbox signals an American street, like a red and tall telephone box signals London,” said Nancy Pope, a postal historian at the Smithsonian Institution.

A U.S. Postal Service letter carrier empties a blue collection box in New York City. Fewer than half the 365,000 mailboxes that stood on street corners a decade ago are still in service. (Photo by Brian Browdie/CNS)

Pope said as women moved into the workplace, they had less time to write letters. Cheap long-distance phone service didn’t help either.  “It’s easy to say it’s all the fault of the Internet, but we have become bad letter writers, so we have to take responsibility,” said Pope.

“It’s a shame it’s all going digital,” said Bekim Prelvukaj, 37, who stopped by the Chelsea mailbox the other day to drop off a parcel and a letter his girlfriend asked him to mail. “The mail is this thing that’s been here for 300 years.”

But don’t expect to see a blue mailbox on eBay anytime soon.  It’s illegal to sell them — partly because wherever a mailbox appears, people tend to put mail in it.  The National Postal Museum has one blue mailbox on display in Washington, D.C.  Its door is locked, but visitors still try to pry it open.  “People will jimmy the lock and put mail in it,” said Pope. “You see that thing and you know what to do with it.  It’s Pavlovian.”

Email: bb2561@columbia.edu