Borough of Cresskill
US Post Office
20 Washington AvenueCresskill, New Jersey 07626
(201) 569-0304
Like any other town in the United States, Cresskill has no jurisdiction over its post office. But some of its citizens work there, and all its citizens are serviced by it.
The lines are frequently long and they often move slowly, but a lot is because people behind the counter are friendly and willing to help. Vince Bonnano, one of the counter clerks, grew up in Cresskill. He knows many of Cresskill’s folks and so tries to bring a smile to their faces--and usually succeeds. Many of the postal workers have been with the Cresskill facility for many years or have just retired after decades on the job.
Manny Rocha is one of the retirees. He trekked through town delivering mail from the sixties until 1993. So accustomed was he to walking miles every day he’s still walking, on his own, as far as three miles from his home on Monroe Avenue. After retiring he also served as the municipal pool commissioner.
Mike Butler, also a Cresskill resident, was promoted after years of delivering mail in Cresskill and later working in Closter to his new position as manager of postal operations in Newark. It may be that his prodigious memory for names and people got him there.
Still with Cresskill post office after more than twenty-five years are Phil Ostlund, who delivers in the downtown area, Frank Colling, Jr., who delivers in Cresskill Gardens, and Don Jones, who delivers west of County Road, Gregg Wiesenthal, who has been with the post office for ten years, is a Cresskill resident.
Catherine Gleason, who lives in Cresskill, was the postmistress, in the fifties and the sixties. Other longtime Cresskill residents were Calvin Harms and Bill Brenneiser, who is deceased. Cresskill’s people may also remember George Tissell, Neil Murray, and Marian Janiack, who were longtime postal employees.
Mail is delivered to residents’ front door by sturdy postal employees, who really do deliver in snow and sleet and freezing rain. That is, mail is delivered to the door everywhere except in Rio Vista and Tammy Brook Hills, where homes are so far apart that delivery is made to streetside mailboxes. Home delivery was begun in 1946, after the borough qualified because it had 50 percent paved sidewalks and had annual receipts of $10,000 gross at the post office. The post office had at one time been located in Mores general store and then where the House of Fish store is located today. In 1952 a new building when up at the corner of Union Avenue and Washington Street, the building now occupied by Hudson City Savings Bank. By the end of the sixties the post office had out grown that facility and had moved into the building it now occupies in the center of Washington Street.