Thursday, October 1, 2026
Glenwood Landing residents have launched a petition to have the United States Postal Service reevaluate the hamlet for home mail delivery. The petition comes after months of residents reporting trouble getting their mail and packages.
The Glenwood Landing Post Office has a new postmaster, Jennifer Gounis, as of the beginning of the year. Since then, residents have raised concerns over being locked out of post office boxes, packages not being sorted and the removal of a community bulletin board.
Resident Jeremy Barth, who has lived in Glenwood Landing for 42 years, started the petition after complaints of mail without a P.O. box number in the address being returned to sender.
“So far now, packages have been sent back,” Barth said. “People’s mortgage statements, such as mine, have been sent back, and I had a credit card, an Exxon card, and that statement was sent back.”
Resident Donna Edquist shared her own experience, saying she visited the post office within 15 minutes of receiving notice that her package would be returned to sender. She added that she showed the package’s tracking number to an employee but was not given the package because the P.O. box was written incorrectly by one digit.
Barth described having to contact billing companies for a change of address as a “huge inconvenience.” Not all entities deliver to P.O. boxes, including UPS Shipping Tools and Federal Express.
Edquist said that she has had difficulty getting some entities to change her address to her P.O. box number and that some companies, like UPS, may refuse to send a package because her address registers as invalid unless she calls and confirms her address. She added that in the past, Disney refused to send MagicBands, needed for park entry, hotel access and secure payments, to her address.
“I actually had to have them sent to a friend,” Edquist said. “They sent them to somebody who wasn’t even me. They were willing to send them to another person but wouldn’t send them to my address.”
Edquist’s daughter, Kelsey, is mailed books by publishers to read and review. Her clients also pay her by mailing her checks. Edquist claimed checks have been returned to sender or remained at the post office without being placed in the P.O. box and without communication.
“It turned out there were seven or eight checks totaling like eight or $9,000,” she said, “just sitting there and had been sitting there for two months.”
Amy Gibbs, USPS spokeswoman for Long Island and Queens, wrote in an email that addresses on mail and packages should follow a four-line format, including the P.O. box number on the third line.
Glenwood Landing has not historically had home mail delivery because it has had fewer than 750 delivery addresses per route, the number required by the USPS to deliver mail directly to homes.
Residents are assigned to the postal service’s Fee Group E for P.O. boxes, meaning they are given the smallest possible P.O. box that accommodates their volume of mail for free. Additionally, they are part of this fee group because they live within a zip code boundary administered by a post office, their physical addresses are potential carrier delivery points and the postal service does not provide carrier delivery to homes.
Residents like Barth question if Glenwood Landing still does not have enough households for home delivery. According to Census Reporter, a site that compiles and presents United States Census data, there are currently 1,615 households in the hamlet.
Gibbs explained in a statement that USPS provides all customers with one free form of delivery, which can include carrier service to a mailbox or a no-fee P.O. box. She added that once the postal service determines the type of delivery it will provide to a delivery area, it does not change it.
“In the case of Glenwood Landing, the Postal Service decided many decades ago that we would provide delivery to Glenwood Landing residents and businesses through no-fee Post Office Boxes,” Gibbs wrote. “We have no plans to change the established type of delivery in Glenwood Landing.”
Barth said he has been in contact with U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi’s office about the issue. He added that the petition’s purpose is to urge the postal service to do a fact-finding survey to determine whether the hamlet qualifies for home delivery. The petition is online at Change.org, and a physical copy at Glen Head Hardware. The online petition has 282 signatures as of press time.
Additionally, Barth pointed out how the community has changed over time. Glenwood Landing regularly received steamboats stopping in Hempstead Harbor at a dock near the intersection of Glenwood Road and Shore Road for several decades, beginning in the late 19th century. The hamlet was also a site of industrial development in the early 20th century.
“The area isn’t an old steamboat industrial area anymore,” Barth said. “It’s matured, and I think we need postal delivery, and the only way to do that is get the postal service to review the area and verify that it meets their requirements.”
Edquist said she would “love” to have home mail delivery and that she thinks the petition is a good idea.
“I know it’s going to take a while,” she said, “but I think it’s worth fighting for at this point.”
The petition can be found at Change.org/p/request-for-mail-delivery-11547.
