The real problem with the Cold Spring Post Office has been created by Mr Constantine Serroukas, owner of the strip mall on Chestnut Street in the Village of Cd Sprg, in which the Post Office is located, and Mr Daniel Katz, owner of the Foodtown supermarket next to the Post Office.
These two businessmen have been for some time attempting to oust the Post Office from its home of many years in the strip mall on Chestnut Street.

These financial interests have been causing a disastrous situation for the Cold Spring community and have endangered the Post Office,which many feel is an important part of life in Cold Spring.

The community pressure on Mayor Seth Gallagher and on the Village Board members has apparently caused the mayor and the Village Board currently to conduct secret negotiations with Mr Serroukas to build a new Post Office on a vacant residential lot owned by him on the corner of Marion Avenue and Benedict Road. This would greatly increase the traffic and congestion and danger to pedestrians in a residential enclave, and would profit Mr Serroukas alone.

The obvious solution to this situation created by Mr Serroukas and Mr Katz, is for Mr Serroukas to extend the Post Office’s lease in its present location for a long-term period, say, for ten years, and for Mr Katz to accept the limitations of the village site for his store. There is no room in the Village for a Walmart-sized facility.

There is no need for the Village of Cold Spring to lose its Post Office to the whims of these two businessmen who are pushing Mayor Seth Gallagher and the Village Board into a disastrous alternative to the obvious and simple solution of extending the lease of the Post Office for the next ten years.

Christopher Boyle

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Type: News

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4 replies on “Pushing out the Post Office…”

  1. With all due respect to your perspective as a resident of Marion Ave., I could not disagree more with your proposed solution.

    Honestly, I’m mystified by the determination of so many village residents to keep the post office. The fact is, regardless of what happens today or tomorrow, it will be gone within five years. There is simply no need to have a post office in every town in the country in the 21st Century. The U.S. postal employees will continue to pass by your house each day delivering the PennySaver and Pottery Barn catalogs that are their only remaining reason for existence, and they can just as easily conduct whatever postal business you need to conduct in person, at your door. The expanded Foodtown could accomodate an unmanned postal station. And the town will be no worse off for it. Cold Spring is defined as a community by so very much more than just it’s post office, for crying out loud! A little bit of timely and necessary evolution is not going to destroy this vibrant village.

    And for those of us who prefer to shop locally rather than to climb into our SUVs and travel 16 miles roundtrip to Walmart, there is little that Cold Spring needs more than an expanded and upgraded supermarket. The Internet is not replacing supermarkets any time soon.

    But I have some good news as well: if this “disaster” does occur, and they (unwisely, in my opinion) build a new post office on the corner of Marion Ave., the world will not end. You already live on a street that sees 18-wheeler traffic on a daily basis, and you chose to move there anyway. Nobody’s life will be in any greater danger than it already is. The histrionics will die down, and life will go on. Personally, I’d love to see the energy that has been put into this petty NIMBY argument channeled to something positive for the village as a whole. There’s still much to be done to make Cold Spring an even greater place to live.

  2. Speaking from my perspective as a resident of Marion Avenue, I am concerned that the hysteria whipped up by Serroukas and Katz about their engineered impending loss to the village of the Post Office will garner support from many residents and from the Mayor and Village Board for the rezoning of the residential lot on the corner of Marion and Benedict, so as to build a new Post Office. Once the lot has been rezoned commercial and a post office has been built, and once, in a few years down the road, as you well point out, the Post Office closes in Cold Spring, Mr Serroukas will have a nice commercial building at his disposal, and I for one feel very anxious to hold on to the residential character of this side of Marion Avenue, and do not relish the idea of a Baskin Robbins or a Kentucky Fried Chicken next door!

  3. I think we all understand what the issue is. You don’t want Serroukas to build a commercial building on his lot located at the end of the street you live on. You’re so determined to prevent this that you are resorting to hanging Serroukas and Katz in effigy and trying to create the same type of community hysteria that you accuse them of creating. You even go so far as to suggest that expanding our tiny and insufficient 8000 SF supermarket by a couple thousand SF would be like having a Walmart in town. (By the way, the Walmart in Fishkill is about 250,000 SF, so that’s a whale of an exageration!) And it’s all about what’s good for you, rather than what’s good for the village. I get it.

    As a resident of Furnace Street, I remember well the conversation in the paper and in town about the appropriateness of the five new homes to be built on Marion Avenue, given the commercial character of that block, facing the untidy backside of a shopping plaza. But, they were built anyway, and purchased. Wonderful. Progress. Congratulations on your new homes.

    But if that small residential addition now threatens the commercial center of our village (and you only have to try and negotiate that parking lot once on a Saturday to understand it IS the commercial center of the village), then maybe it’s time to question again the value of having those fives homes so close to the plaza. Is what’s seen as important to that newly built block really more important than what matters to the village as a whole?

    The addition of the new houses on Marion Avenue has undoubtedly added to the traffic on my tiny one-way street, which most drivers tend to treat as a one-block racetrack, despite it’s strictly residential character and the presence of young children on the block. But I don’t spend a lot of time wringing my hands about it. I’ve moved on. And you could move on to, if you could come to grips with the fact that you already live on a commercial block. A commercial building at the corner of Marion and Benedict would not be the end of life as you know it, and might be beneficial to the village.

    Now, about that Dunkin Donuts…

  4. The history of the Post Office is not new to anyone. The residents of Benedict and Marion have been abused by a Village leadership that is only interested in promoting itself for its own self preservation.

    The residents are entitled to be angry. They live on streets that already see its share of 18 wheelers. They bought their property knowing that. They did not settle in to those homes to forfeit more rights. It does not mean that they should subjugate more of their property rights away because the Village and Planning Board cannot see wisdom. There was a healthy alternative at Butterfield that would have diverted the traffic away from that corridor.

    Would you like to see Furnace Street turned back into a brothel friendly street? No one does.

    Put yourself in your neigbors shoes.

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