702 North Venice Avenue: Rob the Bot

David Aber named this mailbox Rob the Bot (as in RoBot, not the kind of bot you're forced to deal with online):

How can you tell that it's a male robot? He has a beard (and bad hair):

That's a zoomed-in view I made with a photo editor. David took the photo on September 9, 2022. (Thanks Dave!)

4563 East 10th Street: Box guarded by a griffin

As Wikipedia says, "Since classical antiquity, griffins were known for guarding treasures and priceless possessions." Although this box may have a factory-produced design (I couldn't find any in an online search), and we don't usually show mailboxes that aren't handmade, having a griffin watching your mail seems like a good idea to me!

Thanks to David Aber for the photo. He took it September 9, 2022.

Box by the border

On Saturday (January 7) I was on a road at the very southwest corner of the US — south of San Diego, just north of the border wall and a few miles from the Pacific. (Click on the "Location" below for a map.) It's a bizarre place, partly because the US side of the border is rural and the Mexican side has a freeway and Tijuana just behind it. This mailbox stood out:

It's a bit hard to tell, but the black band underneath the mailbox is a tire.

Last call for mail to Santa!

The Russians have been bombarding the North Pole, so Santa's email is down. This is your last chance to send Christmas wishes to Jolly Old Santa: a small plastic mailbox east of Randolph Park along Longfellow Avenue, south of Cooper.

I took the photo December 1st.

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.

You can click on title (shown in orange letters) to see the complete original post. If you do that, click or tap your browser's "back" button to return to this page.

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.)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Wagon Burner Arts (@wagon_burner_arts)