Stamp it 'Open:' New downtown post office debuts

John Swaim picked up his new key and tried out his new post office box bright and early Monday morning. With a stack of mail in his hand, Swaim look around Fairfield's new U.S. Post Office and proclaimed, "So far, so good."

The new downtown pots office at 1300 Post Road replaces the longtime postal facility next door at 1262 Post Road. "It's smaller," Swaim said of the new office, but noted, "I was met by a smiling employee."

That smiling employee was Deloris Lyttle, supervisor at the Fairfield Post Office downtown.

"It was as smooth as could be expected," Lyttle said of the transition over the weekend from the old quarters to the new space. "This was my first time moving."

She said the local postal staff "knows their stuff" and several "young, strong men" were sent from the Stamford Post Office to help do some of the heavy lifting.

After local mail-sorting operations were moved from the Post Road office to the postal center on Commerce Drive, Postal Service officials decided to move to a new, smaller storefront downtown.

"We didn't need that much space," Lyttle said. "It was quite antiquated."

The original Fairfield Post Office is a one-story brick building constructed in 1935 and among its features is a New Deal-era mural from 1938, "Tempora Mutanur et Nos Mutamur in Illis."

The building was bought in May for $4.3 million by 1262 Post Road LLC, an affiliate of Westport Capital Partners, an institutional investment firm on Danbury Road in Wilton.

The new owners recently filed an application with the Town Plan and Zoning Commission to renovate and expand the structure to house from one to three commercial tenants.

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