Most popular mailboxes in ten years (our 10th anniversary)

This blog started exactly ten years ago on 12/12/12 (December 12, 2012) with our first entry What's a mailbox? explaining what we'd show. (Since then, we've also posted Not these mailboxes — which shows “boring” mailboxes we'd show too many times if we kept showing them.)

So you can help us celebrate, we're showing the most popular boxes during our ten years, from highest number of views down to 10th-most views. The older boxes have accumulated more views over the years, so this skews toward older mailboxes.

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1. Desert “air mail” along CA highway 62

March 8, 2013

2. Saguaro You Today?

December 23, 2012

3. 3322 East 24th Street

December 17, 2012

4. 4260 East Calle De Madrid

June 16, 2013

5. 2850 North Tyndall Avenue

May 31, 2016

6. 2345 East Elm Street

December 25, 2013

7. 119 South Irving Avenue

May 31, 2016

8. A mailbox full of poems

May 31, 2016

9. Marvelous Meyer #2: 551 South Meyer

May 31, 2016

10. Seldon Smith's gifts, part 1 of 4

December 7, 2020 (in the area around 4000 East Montecito Street)

Check back on 12/12/32, ten years from now!

Why this box at 11650 East Speedway Boulevard?

This blog is almost ten years old. (Look for a 10th anniversary post on December 12th.) One of my guidelines has been that I usually don't show mass-produced mailboxes, even if they're made by hand. (You can read more by clicking Not these mailboxes, there or at the top of any blog page.) When David Aber emailed some box photos on March 27, I searched using Google Image Search (go to images.google.com and click the camera icon in the search bar). Turns out that Amish people made it by hand. (Here's a Britannica article with more info: Amish: North American religious group.)

Because the blog has been online for so long, I decided to remind us that boxes (usually!) need to be unique. Next time. 😁

The mailbox is at Pegasus Veterinary.

802 South 8th Avenue: What's this?

From time to time I see a mailbox with parts I can't identify. Here's one:

I also can't figure out why it needs a curved post. (Hmmmm… I guess the post fits with the general weirdness of the box.)

If you have a clue, please leave a comment below. (You can be anonymous.)

I drove by — and scratched my head for a while — on March 16, 2022.

Halloween Mailbooooxes

Although it's too late to decorate your mailbox this year (Halloween is today), there are lots of good ideas online. Here's an image search for halloween mailbox on DuckDuckGo (a private search engine that doesn't track what you search for):

    https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=halloween+mailbox&atb=v296-1&iax=images&ia=images

Have a boootiful day!

Flashback to this garden box: 103 South Calle de Jardin

One of the early posts on this blog, Tuesday, May 14, 2013, showed a mailbox that was part of a beautiful wall covered with a mural of flowers and vines. In June of this year (2022), I went back to take closeups of the mural. You can see them in today's post on The Tucson Murals Project blog, titled In 12 years, this garden mural has grown.

I also took closeups of the mailbox:

Fill up your tank at this mailbox: 4802 North Valley Park Avenue

This blog has been quiet while my life has been really busy. (Except for a simple post in May, the last mailbox was on February 21, 2022.) I've been waiting until I had enough photos to post every week. That hasn't happened yet. But I realized that I could post from time to time. So, back to the boxes — for now, slowly!

On April 27, 2022, as I drove over to photograph Joe Pagac's huge Zion City mural, I saw it was so large that I decided to park on the far side of Wetmore so I could fit all of it in my camera. Where Valley Park Avenue meets Wetmore was Sir Clifford's Kustoms, an auto body shop. And in front of the home business was:

(I didn't check the pump to see if it worked. :)

On top was a mailbox with a Mobil logo, like the one below on the pump:

Both sides had a small “signature” near the bottom of the pump:

So don't say that this blog has run out of gas! 😛

Another use for your mailbox: donate food today!

I just spotted this story on the KVOA News 4 Tucson website:

    Help fight hunger by leaving food donations at mailbox Saturday

It's going to be hot today, and I've read stories of peoples' cans of food bursting when they get really hot. So if your letter carrier comes later in the day, you might want to wait until closer to that time to leave your donations. Or stop by a post office.

Mailboxes (mostly) on vacation?

I love to travel, but the pandemic has mostly kept me at home for two years. This year I'm aiming to make up for it. :) Although I'll hope to find a bunch of mailboxes during my time in Tucson, I may not post many mailboxes for several months. I hope you'll keep checking back here or following @TucsonArt on Twitter, where each post here will be automatically tweeted.

Right now I'm in Northern California, where I saw this mailbox with a smiling moon and stars along a narrow country road:

1115 West Congress Street: Cactus-topped tiles

Here's a unique mailbox post: five “branches,” each with a tile on front and a cactus top on top:

David Aber sent it on February 15th. Thanks, Dave!

3174 East 26th Street: Potpourri

Next time you're at Reid Park, you might want to come four blocks south on Country Club and turn left on 26th to see this wild collection:

Part of what makes this fun is the multicolored yard. I didn't think to take a photo when I was there on February 7th.

3142 & 3150 East 26th Street: Spots or stars or ...

I stopped by earlier today and wondered what those white dots are…

A mailbox full of inspiration

After last week's “A mailbox full of poems,” here's another mailbox with messages of inspiration / mensajes de inspiración in Tucson's Barrio Libre neighborhood. Open it to find a stack of messages, as well as a pad and pencil to write your own. This video was posted January 24 on Instagram by @wagon_burner_arts. (If you don't have an account, you can probably click there to see some of their work as long as you don't click on any.)

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A post shared by Wagon Burner Arts (@wagon_burner_arts)

A mailbox full of poems

Treat Avenue runs north-south through central Tucson, but it becomes a sidewalk as it crosses the Broadmoor-Broadway Village neighborhood. It's a nice place to walk; there are benches along its length. Half a block north of Arroyo Chico is a poetry mailbox: Pick up a poem, leave a poem, or write a poem while you sit on the bench:

It's organized by Urban Poetry Pollinators, @urbanpoetrypollinators on Instagram. (If you don't have an account, I think you can click/tap on that link and scroll a bit.)

As far as I know, the mailbox doesn't have a street address. Below is a Google Map showing it:

Here's a link to that map: https://goo.gl/maps/3C3PfejUUdcwiX6H9. You can also ask your GPS for 32.217229417796304, -110.93086206093965. I was there on January 13th.

3044 North Flanwill Boulevard: This mailbox does not overheat

On January 4th — which, the National Weather Service reports, had a high temperature of 70 degrees — David Aber spotted this mailbox topped by a spinning Roof Turbine Vent:

The base has 46 tiles and the door is made of Aluminum Diamond Tread Plate. The mailbox faces west. The first photo is a view of the north and west side. The second is the south and east side. The Roof Turbine Vent on top is in turn topped by a decorative piece:

As usual, I'm amazed by another unbelievable mailbox that he found somehow. (Dave tells me that he spends a lot of time relaxing at home. I'm not so sure. :)

5742 East Helen Street: A critter in paradise

December 8th, 2021, while I was waiting for my lunch at the nearby Salad & Go location, I decided to cruise the neighborhood nearby to see if I could find any interesting mailboxes. I did:

232 East Limberlost Drive: Ten years of mailboxes

Happy 2022! On December 12, 2012, I posted the first mailbox in this blog in What's a mailbox?. Let's get started on another year of boxes.

One of the things I like about artistic mailboxes is that you never know what combinations they'll have. In this case, the house numbers have a desert landscape inside and there's a woodpecker trying to get bugs out of the steel post:

I found this box on December 11, 2021 (ten years after the first mailbox). I'd just left the Stone Curves mural repainting around the corner.

234 East Limberlost Drive: Sun sets on another year of mailboxes

Just at sunset on December 11, 2021, I found this box after I left the Stone Curves mural repainting around the corner:

Next year, the 10th anniversary of this blog will fall on December 12, 2022. Stay tuned for another year of mailboxes!

3410 North Bentley Avenue: Last chance for mail to Santa!

David Aber spotted a cute photo titled in the December 14th Arizona Daily Star, by Kelly Presnell, of a mailbox in the Winterhaven Festival of Lights. It's the first photo in the article Photos: 2021 Winterhaven Festival of Lights. I drove over ASAP, during the day of December 18th, to take a picture of that mailbox:

Of course, the family also has a “real” mailbox. Although it likely doesn't have Christmas lights wrapped around it all year, I'm not sure if the rest of the decoration is only there at Christmas:

319 North Tucson Boulevard

The home actually has two mailboxes. This one is by the street. The other is on top of a high wall. (Many years ago, some people would put a second mailbox high in the air and label it “Air Mail” as a joke. But that one is a pink color with “319” on the side.)

2732 North Orchard Avenue: Box on a tree trunk

Got an axe? Who needs Home Depot?

I spotted this on November 6th.

4407 East Water Street: Bright box with cutouts

Thanks as always to David Aber for this photo. He sent it on August 29.

For some reason, Blogger Maps wouldn't show this address. Here it is on Bing Maps.

2530 North Goyette Avenue: Water and trees

Ddavid Aber sent this photo on August 29. Thank you, Dave.

For some reason, Blogger Maps wouldn't show this address. Here it is on Bing Maps. (Click there.)

3644 East Juarez Street: Chameleon bird

On March 11, 2013, I posted a photo of a (mostly) brown-and-beige bird on top of a mailbox. Fast-forward to October 5, 2021. David Aber sent me a photo of the same bird. The bird had been repainted blue:

Albuquerque mailbox for Veterans Day

I've taken three road trips since June. On my July 2021 trip, in Albuquerque, I spotted this flag-covered mailbox near the Rio Grande:

Can't (couldn't) touch this mailbox: 4218 East 2nd Street

David Sewell, who's moved from Arizona to Virginia, sent a mailbox photo that he took in Tucson on July 4, 2016. It's wrapped with what looks like rusty fence wires:

Google Maps Street View shows that the mailbox was still there in March, 2019. But, for some reason, Blogger Maps wouldn't show this location. Here's the home on Bing Maps.

Thank you, David!

Mailboxes in a painting

I've been traveling much of the past two months — which is one reason I haven't been posting mailboxes. I'm hoping that this can be the first of a long series of posts! It's from an art museum I visited along the way: “Mail Boxes,” dated 1935, by artist Kenneth Callahan, an American who lived 1905-1986:

Nature takes over a mailbox

I'm still busy with Tucson murals. I'm hoping to resume posting Tucson mailboxes by the end of September or so. In the meantime, here's a mailbox somewhere outside Tucson. It's from @SusanSeePhoto on Instagram:

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A post shared by Susan See (@susanseephoto)