Last week we were in North Carolina, visiting my wife’s cousin at UNC Chapel Hill. I was looking at what there was outside of the metro area (the Triangle’s downtowns and large suburban-sprawl fringe). There are a lot of wineries—I wonder how good North Carolina wine is?—and a lot of rural/agricultural land, maybe 30 or 40 minutes from the population centers.

It resembles Northern Virginia, though as I’ve written before, I find it a little too centerless for my taste. Part of that is the lack of rail transit, and part of it is population growth simply happening very quickly, with most new construction being in a modern, spread-out, suburban-sprawl style.

But anyway, there are still a lot of lovely little towns with classic small-town urbanism, and one of them is Pittsboro. It looks like this:

A lot of southern towns strike me as lower-rise and less urban, compared to New Jersey or Pennsylvania, say, but they’re obviously the same thing in a slightly different style.

But I’m writing about Pittsboro because of this. It’s a seafood restaurant. Here’s the business’s main photo on Facebook:

Here it is on Google Street View, in 2015, when it was vacant and for rent:

What does that building look like?

Hint: the name is a hint.

Here you go:

Located in the old Pittsboro Post Office, we are the only casual full service seafood restaurant in downtown Pittsboro. We are committed to serving fresh and seasonal fish and shellfish harvested by fisherman from Virginia to the Carolinas. Our food is prepared and presented in an atmosphere where friends feel comfortable and relaxed to either linger over drinks and a dozen oysters at the bar or sit and enjoy a piece of fresh fish cooked on our wood grill.

Post offices are more likely to reside in pre-existing buildings than to become other things, at least in my experience—here, for example—but I haven’t come across any former post offices that have become commercial/retail buildings.

Pretty neat. Next time I might drive out to Pittsboro.

Related Reading:

A Little Bit of Motel

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #5

Grills and Grilles

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 400 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!

Share