PROTESTORS AT DEMOLISHED SITE OF HISTORIC HOUSTON PROTESTS ENSURE REPLACEMENT STRUCTURE WON’T BE DEMOLISHED 
Responding to months of community pressure and protests, postal service officials today reversed course from an earlier announcement and said they will neither close nor move the Southmore Station Post Office. In March of 1960, 13 college students marched from the campus of Texas Southern University to the Weingarten’s Grocery at 4110 Almeda St. to conduct the city’s first sit-in, at the store’s whites-only lunch counter. The nonviolent protests, which lasted for weeks, led to the desegregation of all city lunch counters just a few months later, and steady movement toward the desegregation of all city facilities. The Weingarten’s building was quietly demolished sometime between 1995 and 2002 (judging from aerial photos of the site); the post office was built in its place. A plaque commemorating the sit-in, erected in 2009, stands on the sidewalk in front of the replacement building’s parking lot. The city still has plans to close or relocate the University, Greenbriar, Julius Melcher, Memorial Park, and Medical Center Station facilities, but no final decisions on them have been announced. [The Houston Advocate] Photo: Defender Network
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This is ridiculous. Nothing about that USPS bldg is in any way connected to the sit-ins. They could fetch, I suspect, decent money for selling the land, and all the complaining seems to be coming from the other side of 288 (where, one would guess, they planned to but a new location, thus, making it even easier for those in 77004 to get to). Why not allow the USPS to try to gain solvency? Whoever might have bought the land would certainly have allowed the placard to stay in place.
You can thank Gilla Jackson Lee for this. She sees racism is everything she looks at.
I work in this neighborhood and am pleased this USPS branch is staying open. This is a heavily trafficked post office, there always is a line (despite the friendly and efficient counter staff), and the number of patrons will only grow with the completion of the many townhomes now being built in the Museum District and the Third Ward.
Black community leaders were all over this…Quannell X, Sheila Jackson Lee, Dwight Boykins all attended protests and issued statements to the media. Yet to people outside their circle, including other minorities, view the entire issue is as absurd. How can you mandate that a current tenant not close their business because of an historic event that occurred in a different building on that site?
The cherry on top is that USPS needs the fluidity to make hard decisions like this to try to become solvent again, and because they won’t be allowed to, in a few more years it will go belly up and all post offices will be put on the market to become townhomes or who knows what else. Good luck fighting that one.
The current building is from, let’s say, 2000. So as long as the historical marker stays, any new building there will be just as related to the sit-in as what’s there now.
I too see nothing special about this post office …. it should have been sold with the provison that the historic sign remain …. the action was historic but the building is anything but.
This particular post office, while busy, had no more business than any of the other of the other scheduled post offices in the area, all of which will have seen increased foot traffic with densification. However, I was assured by the manager from the branch I use (University) that they will be replaced by a storefront having counters, windows and PO Boxes but no sorting of mail will occur at these locations. It will be in with the current zip code boundaries, and hopefully in a convenient location. As for those east of 288 you will still have quite a trip to make thanks to your dedicated politicians.
I’m thinking that they just want to keep their branch PO open and are using the race card to further the cause. I just do not believe that SJL or Quan X or anyone else is so dumb as to think that the post office building itself is historic in any sense of the word.
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The city isn’t the one making the decision to close the other facilities–it’s all USPS.
It’s more than just the post office, it’s what it has meant to the community having the post office and anything else that would be put there should probably have meaning enough to the community if put there, too. The land is historic and shouldn’t just anything be placed there. Nobody else’s community has gone through those kind of pains to even think what those pains all did changing the people of that community.
C, can you elaborate?
Does anyone know for certain that USPS facilities would remain conveniant to those who patronize this one? Were there any plans to place one on… Dowling, for example?
1. This is the dumbest race card / historic card ever played. Do people think logically anymore? 2. Why is USPS closing down an office in one of the nicer/new buildings. There is one just down the street from here that is a dump. Everything about this on both sides is dumb.
Are they sure nothing historic has ever happened, since the beginning of time, on the sites of the other post offices being proposed for closure? Might need to preserve those, too.