Historic NJ Post Office May Need to Be Razed

A village was built in the swampy forest south of Mays Landing during 1918, as the U.S. scrambled to supply artillery for its forces in World War I.

Everything from a hospital to a bowling alley was included in the self-contained town, which housed thousands of workers for the nearby munitions plant. It was all built by the Bethlehem Loading Co., which dubbed the development Belcoville.

Parts of the town endure today on the northeastern edge of Weymouth Township. At its center is the 93-year-old former post office, a white-pillared, one-story building formally recognized as a national landmark.

But that building's time seems to have come as well. Overrun with termites and recently vandalized, it has been boarded up for years, and the township has no money available for the expensive renovations needed to keep it standing.

So, the Township Committee in the community 15 miles west of Atlantic City is starting the process for demolishing the Madden Avenue structure, which may be no simple task given the laws protecting historic buildings.

"I don't think there's a possible resurrection in today's economic climate," said Suzanne Smith, a volunteer with the Weymouth Historical Society. "It's sad that's the outcome, but it's also the reality of today."

The building has been in danger for years, and locals rallied to have it recognized by the state Historic Preservation Office in 2007 and the National Park Service in 2008. Tens of thousands of dollars have been spent making plans on how to preserve it, but hundreds of thousands of dollars are needed to implement those plans.

In 2005, the issue was put to a township vote. The ballot question in the general election that November was a nonbinding referendum asking to raise about $740,000 to repair the building.

Voters rejected it by a 2-1 margin. Those repairs would be only more expensive today. The building has been boarded up for years. Termites have ravaged it to the point that a pencil can poke through parts of support beams.

Recently, metal thieves stole all of the radiator piping they could scrap.

They also started a fire in one of the toilets. "It's in absolutely terrible shape," said Mayor Frank Craig, who said he is concerned about neighborhood children getting into the crumbling structure and injuring themselves.

"It's a liability," Township Clerk Bonnie Yearsley said. "If it collapses and someone's in there and it kills them, what happens to the township?"

Yearsley said she went to school in the building, which was an elementary school from 1923 to 1974.  While built as a post office, the building functioned as one for fewer than nine months. After the war ended in November 1918, the town began to disappear as quickly as it materialized.

In its lifetime, the post office was also used as a community building called the Roland Marsh Center, a meeting place for church groups, a building for art shows and an office for county workers.

After the floor began to cave in about 2000, the township ordered an inspection. Based on its deteriorating condition, it was closed in 2002, and boarded up in 2004.

Since then, at least $20,000 has gone into studying the feasibility of keeping it intact. A meeting was held among federal, state, county and local officials to discuss the issue. "And everyone at that meeting said, `Well, it's a great building, it has a lot of history, but no one has any money,"' Yearsley recalled.

The Township Committee addressed the issue at its recent regular meeting and reached a reluctant consensus that the most prudent action at this point would be to simply tear the structure down.

"But what we hope to do is erect a little monument there," newly elected Township Committeeman Dennis Doyle said. Getting approval to knock the building down will take some time, though.

The main point of having buildings and places recognized as historic is to keep them that way, with restrictions on any plans that would affect them. It could take as many as 120 days to get approval from the state for demolishing the building once an application is filed.

At the same time, some locals are holding out hope that it can still be saved.

"It's not exactly a lost cause," said Monty Holt, who lives just across the Weymouth border in Estell Manor. "It's just a matter of lost interest."

Holt has requested that the county acquire the property through its open space program and use its funds to restore it as part of the nearby county park where much of Belcoville once was.

But as grants go, most would require a matching amount of money from the township, which simply is in short supply. "You need to say, `What's best for the residents here and now,' not the residents from 1917," Yearsley said.

The loss will be unique, Smith said. As far as she knows, the post office is the only one of its kind left on the East Coast, a relic in one of the only company towns in the country where people have lived continually since the First World War.

"The building's usefulness has expired," Smith said, "and if a building's not used, it dies."

 (Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)