Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Detroit's postmark may join Chevrolet, Ford and Dodge among the city's endangered symbols.

The U.S. Postal Service wants to move mail cancellation to a new facility outside the city -- and change the postmark to ``Michigan Metroplex.'' Residents and postal workers are disgruntled by the proposal.

``When you mail a letter in Atlanta, it's not postmarked Dunwoody, Georgia,'' Clive Cleveland, a former city council member who worked as a mail carrier in 1957, said at a public hearing in the city last week. ``No city of Detroit stamp? Can you imagine that?''

Losing its postmark is another blow to a beaten-down city. Detroit has lost jobs and prestige in the auto industry. Toyota Motor Corp. passed Ford Motor Co., based in nearby Dearborn, as the second-biggest automaker in the U.S. The unemployment rate was 15.1 percent in August, about triple the U.S. average. Five of the 10 ZIP codes with the highest mortgage foreclosure rates in June were in Detroit, according to RealtyTrac Inc., which sells foreclosure data.

Most germane, Detroit shrank to 871,121 residents last year from 1.03 million in 1990, according to the U.S. Census. Its rank dropped to 11th-biggest city in the U.S. from seventh.

Fewer people means fewer pieces of mail. Detroit residents are mailing about 800,000 individual letters, postcards and other items each day, down from more than a million a decade ago, said Jim Mruk, spokesman for the USPS in the Great Lakes region that includes Detroit.

Internet Competition

``Only about 29 percent of first-class mail is canceled, because people are switching to things like Internet bill paying,'' Mruk said. Nationally, the volume of first class, single-piece mail has declined 22 percent since 1998, he said.

The Postal Service says canceling Detroit's mail at the facility in Pontiac, 32 miles (51 kilometers) away, will save $4.3 million a year. The plant was built to consolidate the operations of seven smaller sorting plants on the outskirts of the city.

The postal service is also considering canceling mail from Kansas City, Kansas, in Kansas City, Missouri. The mail from St. Petersburg, Florida, is being canceled across the bay in Tampa, Florida, and both cities' names are on the new postmark. The program, called Area Mail Processing, will result in total savings of about $18.6 million a year, according to an overview of the plans on the agency's Web site.

Decision Next Year

Detroit is the biggest city being targeted. Mail from Flint, another Michigan city racked by auto-industry plant shutdowns and cutbacks, would be routed through the Pontiac site as well. The postal service will announce its decision next year.

If the change goes through, letters will be postmarked ``Detroit'' only if they're taken to one of about two dozen post offices in the city and hand-stamping is requested. Letters deposited at corner mailboxes would receive the ``Michigan Metroplex'' cancellation.

``It's certainly a symbolic hit for Detroit,'' said Thomas Sugrue, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and author of ``The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.'' ``For many letter writers, it's the mark of their affiliation to the place.''

The shift underscores the ``real economic blows of the last half century,'' said Sugrue, who was born in Detroit and has a keepsake brick from the city's now-demolished J.L. Hudson Department store in his office. ``It's yet another reminder of the forces of decentralization and suburbanization away from the central city.''

Lagging Sales

It comes as Michigan's auto industry, with its deep Detroit roots, faces fresh setbacks.

July was the first month that sales of Ford, General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC models totaled less than half of U.S. sales as Americans bought more vehicles from Toyota and Honda Motor Co. In August, Toyota passed Ford to become the second- largest U.S. automaker this year. It kept the lead in September.

The three U.S.-based automakers reported combined losses of about $15 billion last year, led by Ford's record $12.6 billion record, and are cutting thousands of workers as they close factories because of the declining market share.

Michigan's population fell by about 5,000 residents last year, the first decline since the auto industry's downturn of 1980-1983, when the U.S. government backed loans to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy. The 2006 decline is only the eighth time since 1900 that Michigan's population has dropped, according to the U.S. Census.

``It reminds me of the day I learned there are no televisions made in America anymore,'' said Jack Lessenberry, a Wayne State University professor in Detroit who remembers collecting postmarks as a fifth-grader in the city in 1961.

``Detroit was, of course, the most common one for me,'' he said. ``It's sad. An era is ending.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeff Green in Southfield, Michigan, at jgreen16@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 30, 2007 00:09 EDT