A Post Office Customer’s Dream--No Waiting : * Mail: While patrons languish in queues at other branches, the city’s new main office seldom has a line.

One late afternoon this week, 19 people were waiting in line for two clerks at the Crescent Station post office in Beverly Hills. At the city’s new main post office, five blocks away, there were three clerks and no waiting--a postal patron’s dream, and free underground parking, too.

Why wait in line? “I’m a creature of habit,” said one customer, Morgan Ames, a 20-year patron of Crescent Station despite the hassles of finding parking, feeding the meter and dealing with the crowds inside.

Many Beverly Hills residents and workers have the same habit, using the 58-year-old former main office at a rate of about 1,300 transactions a day, compared with 300 to 400 for the new one.

But the U.S. Postal Service hopes to see those numbers come into balance as customers learn of the new facility at 425 N. Maple Drive, in the city’s industrial east end.

Ames, for example, indicated a willingness to change his routine when told about the new post office.

“Three clerks and no waiting? What the hell am I doing here?” he said. “I’m the type of person who tries to keep stress down, so I’ll be going there more often.”

Postmaster Koula Fuller had people like Ames in mind when she picked out the colors for the new main post office. Decorated with a five-ton eagle rescued from an old post office on the eve of demolition, it is soothingly air-conditioned and comes in low-stress shades of pastel gray and beige.

The Postal Service was seeking to make it “as beautiful as possible with respect to the aesthetics of a city like Beverly Hills, without being excessive,” she said.

But there was little she could do about the lines of customers at Crescent Station, at the corner of Crescent Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard. Because of federal budget cuts, she said, she had to reduce the staff there to open the customer windows at Maple Drive in June.

The upper floors, where vehicles are stored and where workers process 325,000 pieces of mail a day, went into use in November, 1990.

Fuller, postmaster since 1982, said the new building cost about $20 million. Most of that sum went to acquire the land from Vicktor Family Investments, which previously leased it to the Postal Service for a sorting annex. The new building was designed by architect Nat Abrams of Los Angeles.

Had the deal not gone through, she said, the new facility would have been built outside Beverly Hills, most likely in Culver City.

The Beverly Hills Post Office, which also has stations at 8383 Wilshire Blvd. and at 312 S. Beverly Drive, has 250 employees. It handles revenues of $18 million a year and serves about 25,000 addresses in Beverly Hills and 3,000 more in Los Angeles.

Fuller is aware that Beverly Hills postal patrons are special.

“These are people who are very dynamic and exacting, and their attitude toward the services they require in any field is similar,” she said. “I mean it in a nice way--they need to be served quickly, by articulate, efficient people.”

Although proud of the new building, Fuller acknowledged some small problems, such as a pigeon infestation in the basement and the lack of paths across the landscaped parkways. She was also left without funds to furnish her spacious new office.

Fuller denied reports that plans were afoot to close window service at Crescent Station, or, alternatively, to shutter the counters at the new one because of low demand.

A planned refurbishing, which would have closed Crescent for a month or more, has been taken off the schedule for lack of money, she said.

Designed by architect Ralph Flewelling to look like an Italian Renaissance villa, the Crescent Drive building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

It features terra-cotta balustrades, sandstone patios, marble interior walls and WPA frescoes by Charles Kessler of construction workers building a high-rise.

Local history buffs will note, however, that it was not the original Beverly Hills post office. A letter from cowboy entertainer Will Rogers to then-Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, written at the onset of the Depression in 1930, reveals that there was an earlier facility, after a fashion.

Rogers, who served as honorary mayor of the city, then a horsey suburb, managed to jar loose $300,000 in federal funds to build the Crescent Station.

“We are getting a lot of mail out here now, and they are handling it in a tent,” Rogers said in his letter. “It is mostly circulars from Washington with speeches on prosperity, but it makes awful good reading while waiting for the foreclosure.”