The United States Postal Service is older than the United States itself, and is in danger of disappearing.
The postal service is also one of the first enumerated powers granted by the founding fathers, commensurate to minting money and declaring war. The free movement of news and information was recognized as critical to a functioning democracy.
Through a combination of financial mismanagement, declining need, and political undermining, the USPS is in a position where it is losing money. And when treated as a business and not a service, losing money means shutting things down.
There is a post office in almost every zipcode in the United States. They form the background noise of life, quietly receiving and delivering mail to every US citizen, regardless of address. They carry their own visual language, and share a style that is immediately recognizable. They are one of the few pieces of federal architecture that nearly everyone in the country lives near.
We're in danger of losing the USPS. This website is an attempt to archive these buildings, and the beautiful service they represent.
How it works
Look up a zipcode to see the post offices in it and the photographs people have contributed, or start from the coverage map and work down from a state. Sign in — there is no password, just a link sent to your email — and you can add a post office that is missing, or upload a photograph of one.
Where a zipcode has several photographs, votes decide which one represents it. Ranking uses the lower bound of a confidence interval rather than a raw score, so a single enthusiastic vote does not outrank a photograph that many people have judged.
Where the data comes from
Zipcode boundaries are Census ZCTAs, which are in the public domain. Post office locations come from OpenStreetMap and are available under the ODbL; you can download this archive's post office data under that same licence. Imported records are provisional until somebody who has stood in front of the building confirms them.
Photographs are not covered by that licence. They remain the property of the people who took them.
Things that are wrong, and why
Census ZCTAs are not quite zipcodes. There are around 33,000 of them against the Postal Service's roughly 41,000 codes, and the ones missing are mostly codes that exist only for PO Boxes rather than for a delivery area. If a code you know is absent, that is usually why.
A zipcode can also look empty while being perfectly well served, because the branch that serves it sits just over the line in the next code. Those pages suggest the nearest zipcodes that do have a post office rather than pretending nothing is there.
Coverage of the post offices themselves is good but not complete, and some records arrive without a name or a street address. Anyone signed in can add a post office that is missing, or photograph one that is not here yet. Editing or confirming a record that already exists is not built.