Blogwatch: Ugly Mailbox
By Never teh BrideI love niche blogs. Back when Manolo for the Home was just getting off the ground, I posted about a blog devoted entirely to faux bois and another that concerns itself with nothing but Ikea hacking. I just recently came across another such blog — this one a tribute to ugly mailboxes.
Where I live, no one keeps a roadside mailbox. All of ours are attached to houses or porches, and some people even have slots in their front doors, as I’m led to believe is quite common in England. My father, mother, and grandparents all receive their mail in regulation-height boxes located on the very edge of their properties so the mail person needn’t get out of their truck. Now and then, jerky teens with driver’s licenses whiz by with bats and knock them over. Perhaps this is simply one of the perils of suburban living?
A certain Tim Morris wrote about suburban mailboxes, and I found his description of the average specimens to be apropos.
I began to look at everyone else’s mailbox on my walks. Were they as nice as mine? Did they have the E-Z Up construction? How did the neighbors manage to attach those foot-thick oblong cedar braces with the provided “Self-Tapping Wood Screws”? I certainly hadn’t been able to do that. Mailboxes were worth another look.
There are two kinds of mailbox: the ugly, and the hideous. Ugly mailboxes consist of a rounded steel box mounted on a plain length of pipe. Hideous mailboxes try to look like they are not mailboxes. Or rather, they try to look like mailboxes that are attractively shaped unlike mailboxes. No one wants to camouflage a mailbox so well that they hide its purpose completely. In this respect, mailboxes are like lamps. You know the lamps that purport to be coffee grinders, clocks, Chevrolets, Elvises, objets d’art, cigar boxes, stumps of petrified wood . . . each one with a lightbulb coming brazenly out of the top of it. So it is with hideous mailboxes. They flaunt their obvious disguise of their own obviousness.
The mailboxes I like least are the ones embedded in the chests of half-sized concrete manatees. It’s a Florida thing, I think. What did the ugliest mailbox you’ve ever seen look like?
September 3rd, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Dude. the manatees are deeply disturbing.
The license plate one, on the other hand, has a certain tasteless charm.
September 4th, 2008 at 3:10 am
Is that pictured deer mailbox located somewhere nearby you or it’s just a reference picture? (I wonder, what sane person could put something that horrible in the front of their yard?) But looking at it from a different point of view, we can’t take it that harsh because everoyne of us wants to be original… in a way. Although this is reaching the very limits of “originality”, I think it’s not that bad as some people think.
September 4th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Twistie: I’ve always thought those poor manatees look terribly uncomfortable. I would, too, if someone shoved a mailbox into my gullet!
Maria: It’s not anywhere near me, thankfully! But I’m not saying it’s horrible….just a little odd.
September 5th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
The manatee mailboxes don’t do it for me, but I confess there were quite a few I’d like to have! The Taj Mahal and the White House, the Headless Horseman, a couple of Fish, the big Mushroom, a Dragon or two - I thought they were fun!
September 6th, 2008 at 3:53 am
There’s a mailbox near my house which the owners appear to have wanted to encase in concrete all covered over with similiarly sized round-ish rocks. It wouldn’t be too bad, except they only finished it halfway. The top half is covered with concrete but no rocks. It annoys me every time I see it. Just finish the project! (Other than that it really isn’t too bad I guess.)
September 10th, 2008 at 8:07 am
La BellaDonna: I think the headless horseman would scare me the same way my skull sneakers scare me. I’d never go out into the yard at night ever again.
rachel: That sounds like it would drive me crazy, too.