Post office, museum hopes fundraiser will increase its 5% margin

Dennis Hanagan –

Toronto’s First Post Office on Adelaide St. E. needs extra funds to help with its operating costs and hopes a rare performance in March of The Dumbells at the St. Lawrence Hall will be serve as a fundraiser.

“We’ve supported ourselves all these years as a post office,” says TFPO’s director and curator Janet Walters. But these days with Canada Post selling post offices—its stately building on Yonge north of Eglinton was sold for condominiums—the postal business “is really not the horse to have your wagon hitched to anymore,” says Walters.

It doesn’t help that large drug stores include postal outlets where shoppers can buy their mailing needs. That cuts into TFPO’s market. Added to that is the fact TFPO pays 95% to Canada Post of anything it sells.

“That’s what it means to have a 5% margin. It’s really tight,” says Walters. If TFPO sells a thousand dollars in stamps it gets $50.

“We’re holding our own but it means having to increase market share,” says Walters.

TFPO at 260 Adelaide St. E. is full-service, has a little museum explaining how letters were written in the 1800s, and is run by the Town of York Historical Society. The society’s website says when York (founded in 1793) was incorporated in 1834 as a city its fourth post office—built in 1833—became Toronto’s first. Hence TFPO’s name.

It shut down as a post office in 1839, then was revived as a postal outlet in 1983.

As for the March 6 Soldiers of Song: A Tribute to The Dumbells at St. Lawrence Hall on King at Jarvis the musical harkens to the days of the First World War when members in the Canadian army’s Third Division bolstered troop morale with live “concert parties” featuring irreverent and dark humour that poked fun at senior officers and the military.

The performance marks Toronto’s 180th birthday and the 100th anniversary of the war’s beginning.

Tickets are available online at https://cabinmedia.ca/tickets/tickets/22.