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Postal machine from 1907 would be at home in Presidio P.O.

With its layers of history, having been home to the Ohlone, Spanish soldiers, and American troops from the Civil War until it was made a national park in 1994, the Presidio takes its history very seriously.

And with all those layers of history comes a certain level of mystery and intrigue, with rumors of haunted pet cemeteries and Don Fisher’s missing art museum adding to the park’s rich lore.

Among the many mysterious curiosities within the Presidio is the cause of the long lines at its tiny outpost of the United States Postal Service. The Presidio post office shares an historic building at the Presidio Main Post with a small branch of First Republic Bank. The Presidio post office is very popular on the North end of town because it offers the rarest of urban amenities: free and plentiful parking.

But it lacks an Automated Postal Center, the machine the USPS installed at 17 of the city’s 41 post offices a few years back to allow customers to mail packages and conduct most other business without having to wait for a clerk. Post offices without the APCs require most business to be handled by a clerk.

Matters at the Presidio post office grew worse last month, when its stamp-vending machine was hauled away. Dust bunnies still sit on the historic wood-plank floor where the stamp machine once sat.

Lines at the Presidio post office, which often appears to be staffed by a single clerk, often snake out the facility’s historic door. Frustration can run high, with an anecdotal but significant number of patrons turning on their heels and giving up before it is even close to being their turn.

One such customer on a recent Wednesday was Harriette Helmer, who works for a private company in the Presidio and who is a frequent, if exasperated, customer. “Could you hold my place in line, I just want to see if there is a stamp machine,” she appealed to another line-sitter at lunchtime. Returning to line, now 12-people deep, she sighed, “I come here a lot. It’s very inconvenient if you work in the Presidio for the post office not to have a stamp machine. This is a really busy post office.”

After a few minutes, as the lone clerk spent some time helping an elderly woman dressed in a pink pantsuit select from among the many choices of commemorative stamps, Helmer sighed louder and left entirely. The grim remaining crowd stared at the clerk and the pink-clad back of the stamp-buyer. Rockwell’s 80s tune Somebody’s Watching Meeeee (with Michael Jackson doing backup vocals) played tinnily over a loudspeaker, and the clerk did a little chair boogie to pass the time.

Why is this post office so slow, someone in the line had earlier asked the calm and genial lone clerk, whose badge read, “Willi.” The clerk explained: “It’s the Presidio Trust."

The Presidio Trust is the powerful entity charged with the preservation and development of the 1,491-acre park, with its hundreds of historic buildings housing everything from the Lucasfilm Ltd. movie studio to the Warming Hut café. The clerk explained to his captive customers that the Trust’s rules are so draconian that the Presidio post office was forced to remove its stamp machine, and has no hope of ever installing a newfangled APC. “We cannot do anything to that facility without their permission,” said LaTanya Degraffenreed, the USPS station manager who oversees the offices in the Presidio, the Marina and Marina Green.

It seems, however, that the Presidio postal clerk misaddressed the blame. While the Trust does aim to preserve the historic character of buildings in the park, considering pre-European times to World War II as its “period,” the park’s other business tenants do have decidedly un-historic conveniences. The First Republic Bank has an ATM, developed well after D-Day. And the Presidio fire station, which dates to 1916 and which was rehabbed in 1998, has pressurized water and modern trucks, acknowledged station Chief Matt Kolbassa. “The historic preservation folks are…malleable with life-safety stuff,” he noted.

The general view in the Presidio post office that the Trust is to blame for its low-tech ways is just the latest of the Presidio myths, this one promoted by a rogue clerk with perhaps too vivid an imagination and too captive an audience.

Robert Wallace, the Presidio Trust’s architect and associate director of design, has spent the past 17 years overseeing the historic rehabilitation of hundreds of the Presidio’s buildings, and he isn’t surprised to be the one blamed in what is apparently an urban myth over why the Presidio post office is so maddeningly behind the times. “It is a red herring” that the Presidio Trust bans any modern upgrades to buildings there. “Oftentimes people use historic preservation as a rationale for why they didn’t do something,” Wallace explained.

Though arguably more beautiful, the Presidio post office operates under the same aversion to customer convenience that the postal service adopts nationwide.

James Wigdel, the USPS spokesman for San Francisco, said that stamp-vending machines are being removed from every post office in the nation because they are old and hard to maintain. And if a post office is not already one of the few that has an APC, Wigdel said, it will never get one, since the machines are not being manufactured any more.

Nationally, the USPS aims for wait times of fewer than 5 minutes to see a clerk, and Wigdel said he cannot discuss the specific situation at the Presidio.

As a general matter, said Widgel, “What we encourage is for customers not to go to the post office. We are trying to embrace the future and encourage people to use USPS.com,” where customers can print out postage and schedule package pickups. “The green thing,” Wigdel concluded, “is not to go to the post office at all.”