How the US Postal Service Fell Apart

Inside a grad student's apartment at the University of Pennsylvania sits a slightly faded blue-and-white wooden sign from a post office in Malone, Wash., that no longer exists.

If this were any other college student's place, the sign would probably be a trophy from some kind of prank. But no: it was a gift from the post office to 25-year-old Evan Kalish, a UPenn graduate student who has crisscrossed the Northeast, driven down South and flown to Hawaii to see more than 2,700 post offices, many of which are in danger of closing or have already been shuttered.

Over the past three years, he's documented the slow death of an institution that was once at the heart of small-town America, taking photos, collecting postal cards, paying tribute.