Everything Old Is New Again at the Reborn Sagaponack PO

For Springs blacksmith, metal craftsman and sculptor James DeMartis, the 1,100 or so antique brass doors mounted on the customer boxes of the “new” Sagaponack Post Office are labors of love and works of art.

“Old” and “funky” as well as “cramped” were words that applied to the former post office. Now it is posh, sleek and roomier, with two opposing walls of shiny brass box doors that date back decades to more than a century. There’s also basement and attic storage space now and the building fully complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A tenant in the Sagaponack General Store since it opened for business on Sagg Main Street in 1878, the original post office closed in November, 2023 while the entire building was shifted west and virtually rebuilt from the frame out.

Postal customers got their mail at a trailer on Hedges Lane until the post office reopened in early June, nearly two months after the store itself had reopened.

Fixing, restoring and mounting those approximately 1,100 restored brass doors and making them work with standard-issue USPS mounting hardware “was a nine-month process that drew all of my skills in design, engineering and refinishing and fabrication,” DeMartis said during an interview at his studio off Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton.

Nearby, in the parking area of his shop, leaned a rickety set of wooden shelves divided into slots dating from the 1950s. Removed from the former PO, it was one of a dozen shelf structures that housed about 600 customer boxes and their age-stained brass doors, the holders’ names taped above the back entry of each slot.

At least one long-time patron was hoping she’d have “the same box,” as she put it, when the post office reopened.

The chances of that were nil because DeMartis and his staff at the metal shop built entirely new “boxes” — actually nooks in a new shelf system — from scratch to fit inside the standard mounting platforms called “carousels” that the Postal Service required.

DeMartis and crew made 17 of these inserts out of “aerospace honeycombed lightweight aluminum,” he said. That design and fabrication task “was why I got the job,” he said. “Standard-issue materials couldn’t be used because they couldn’t accommodate the brass doors.”

As for those doors, there was a very remote chance that a patron could wind up with the same one they’d had before, DeMartis said. But some came from elsewhere, some were scrapped due to incompatible sizes, and they all got mixed up in the repair and refurbishment process.

Many of the doors are original to the Sagaponack PO but hundreds came from a collector of old lockbox doors, a former teacher and retired school bus-driver instructor in Mount Airy, North Carolina, named Erroll Hill. He’s known for making novelty banks with them, which he sells through the university bookstore to alumni of Wake Forest University, from which Hill purchased thousands of retired brass postal lockbox doors. He also acquired a stash from Tennessee Tech.

For a long time, the USPS resisted the plan to reuse the brass doors in the new Sagaponack PO. They are a rare exception to the USPS requirement that new post offices feature lightweight aluminum doors, among other uniform features, DeMartis said.

DeMartis credited his boss on the project, philanthropist Mindy Gray, with spending close to two years negotiating with the USPS for various waivers from the usual post office specifications.

“My understanding is that she wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer in her effort to preserve the history and aesthetic of the Sagaponack PO,” DeMartis said.

“They wanted to put in red and blue linoleum and plastic,” Gray said of the regional postal officials with whom she pleaded, “and it’s now oak and marble and bronze. And James did the most skilled, spectacular renovation to make sure the finishes all match.”

Interviewed at the store in May, she also praised her site manager, Nick Zappola of Zappola Construction in Sag Harbor, for crafting the fine oak trim that encases the restored brass doors.

It was Zappola’s predecessor as site manager, David Currie, who found Erroll Hill and his supply of doors, Hill explained in a phone interview.

Currie’s search started with Sagaponack Postmaster Karen Bennett, who steered him to a woman in South Carolina in her 80s, Jane H. Ingram, who’s famous among postal history buffs as the guru of antique box doors. (She is the author of a 1989 spiral-bound book, updated in 1999 and now out of print, titled “Post Office Lockbox Doors: An Illustrated Guide.”) She had known about Hill’s stash and connected Currie with him.

The new “Sagaponack PO is the only zip code in the country” where the USPS allowed the installation of antique brass doors in a new facility, DeMartis said.

Gray agreed. “I think this is not something that has been done before,” she said.

Asked in an email “how unusual is this project for the USPS?,” a spokesperson in Brooklyn offered only this response: “These types of projects are subject to the decision-making of individual postal districts.”

Gray bought the Sagaponack General Store in 2021 for a reported $3.75 million. From the start, she wanted to keep the PO as a tenant. Under her guidance, the store and its post office section underwent a meticulous renovation to modernize them and at the same time preserve aspects of their 19th-century roots and their joint role as a community center.

Gray’s original site manager tapped DeMartis for the job, having worked with him on architectural projects in her home. Co-founder of the Gray Foundation, Gray has been a Sagaponack resident for 24 years with her four children and husband Jonathan, the chief operating officer and president of the Blackstone Group asset-management firm.

The new Sagaponack General Store opened for business on April 16 to wide acclaim for its new, roomy front porch — made possible by the site’s shift 15 feet westward from Sagg Main Street — and its soaring interior spaces, its farmland-and-barn view through the glassed rear wall and its celebration of the original building’s 19th-century charms.

The benches on the front porch were made from wood taken from the original building. The old-looking flooring in the store is new “wire-brushed white country oak,” according to Zappola.

The post office space on the north end of the building remained locked for weeks while issues with the internet connection were resolved, according to Gray. The USPS spokesperson in an email attributed the delay to “technical aspects.”

Before DeMartis and his team started working on them in late 2024, Gray’s supply of brass doors — the Sagaponack originals actually belonged to the Postal Service — were dark, dingy, crooked and in varying states of disrepair.

“We had to straighten all the frames; some didn’t sit flat. The doors had to be straightened. They had to be degreased and cleaned … The trick was to clean them up and refinish them without making them look new,” DeMartis said.

He also had to take various kind of boxes “with many different appearances and make them look harmonious,” he said. The work included matching loose keys to locks, replacing locks, and, in the case of combination-lock boxes, figuring out the combinations.

In addition to supplying the brass doors he’d secured from post offices that once served Wake Forest and Tennessee Tech, Hill provided replacement glass and new number decals for the refurbished doors. He spent 10 days over two visits to East Hampton helping DeMartis and his crew with the work.

Although there were no guarantees that patrons would get the same door they’d had in the old PO, they were promised they’d keep their box number, both in the temporary post office in the trailer on Hedges Lane that Gray supplied to the USPS and in the new PO in the rebuilt store.

The biggest challenge of the job for DeMartis was crafting a way for the refurbished doors to fit on the regulation sheet-metal “carousels” that the USPS requires post offices to use for mounting patron boxes when there is limited floor space.

In the old post office, those rough shelves containing patron boxes stood some distance from the walls, far enough to give postal workers room to slip behind them to sort the mail.

In the new PO, the postal boxes are mounted flush against the walls, leaving more floor space for patrons than before even though the new PO — with 670 square feet of floor area — has more boxes but is actually smaller than the original, which covered 732 square feet.

To gain access to the rear openings of the boxes for mail sorting, Postmaster Bennett and her two workers can stand in front of the array of boxes contained in each of the 17 carousels, unlock it and rotate it 180 degrees for sorting.

The USPS wouldn’t allow for an interview with Bennett. Its spokesperson in Brooklyn offered this response to an emailed request for Bennett’s thoughts on the new PO: “We thank our customers for their patience during the renovations and are equally excited to move back into the space.”

Sagaponack Mayor Bill Tillotson said this about the new PO: “I love it.”

A tall man, he was grateful that his new box is mounted high up, just as his previous one was. And his lock, he added, “has never worked so well.”