It would seem most marketers are aware that the World Trade Center towers are no longer standing.
Not true, according to the U.S. Postal Service.
The post office at 90 Church Street Station — right next to the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan — receives more than 300 pieces of direct mail each day addressed to one of the two buildings.
It would be simple enough to clean mailing lists of the address, says USPS spokeswoman Pat McGovern. The towers had their own ZIP code, 10048, which could be stripped from the records.
So what happens to all that mail?
Some of the larger firms that relocated after the events of Sept. 11, 2001 pay a fee to have their mail held and send someone to pick it up every few days or so. First class, Express Mail and Priority Mail are returned to the sender. Standard mail is either destroyed based on the customer's request, forwarded for a fee, or returned to senders with address correction information so the senders can clean their files.
“People need to keep up their mailing lists,” McGovern says. “It's important for the postal service and [especially for] customers, because they're printing something that's not going to be read.”
The USPS normally forwards first class mail for one year, but extended that rule to three years due to the extraordinary circumstances.
Before September 11, the towers received 85,000 pieces of mail per day, all sorted and distributed at the Church Street Station. The office, a historic landmark, closed for three years after the two buildings collapsed. About 800 windows had to be replaced and a thorough cleaning was ordered. Postal employees from the station — now down to about 300 from 700 — had yet to make deliveries that day to the World Trade Center, so all escaped unharmed, McGovern says.
She adds that incoming mail continues to take an emotional toll on the postal service staff.
“It's a reminder,” she says.
