
New York City’s Mail Chutes (2015) - tonyedgecombe
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-york-citys-mail-chutes-are-lovely-ingenious-and-almost-entirely-ignored
======
OldHand2018
My office is in a building with a Cutler Mail Chute in active service with
daily pickup service from the Postal Service.

It just adds that extra bit of character to an old building, especially with
the floor-to-ceiling glass. Every so often, you'll see that flash of white out
of the corner of your eye as an envelope from an upper floor falls past you.

They do get clogged, and someone has to notice and let the building management
know. This can be a problem if the blockage is on an unoccupied floor - the
mail needs to pile up until it is visible on a floor with a tenant!

~~~
alexpotato
Just like multi hop pub sub messaging systems! If a middle host is dropping
messages and there is no monitoring, you don't find out till much later.

~~~
OldHand2018
Well in this case they are in an unlimited size buffer. Once the blockage is
cleared, all messages are delivered at once!

I've seen the postal worker doing daily collections in the lobby and the
container they use could probably hold the letter volume for a month or two
without issue.

Also, to be clear, my office has been there for nearly 15 years. In that time
I've known of 4 or 5 blockages. It's actually very reliable.

------
woodruffw
The building that I grew up in (built right before the Great Depression) had
one of these. I sent letters down it a few times.

I also tried to send a banana down it, which wasn't appreciated by the super.
It turns out there isn't an easy way to retrieve a banana stuck between
floors, short of sending something bigger through.

~~~
pimlottc
But was the banana properly addressed?

~~~
woodruffw
No, but the apology letter that I was forced to write to the super was.

------
kube-system
I've worked in buildings with these, but I've never seen one that made me feel
confident that my mail was actually going to be picked up at the other end.
Given some of the examples in the article, maybe that was a wise doubt to
have.

~~~
em-bee
you send two letters at the same time. one to yourself, and one to actual
destination. throw them in together. if your self-addressed letter arrives
then you know that the other one made it through too.

------
dhosek
I've worked in buildings in Chicago with these. The mail slot is just a little
too narrow to fit a Netflix envelope.

~~~
brianwawok
A lot of Chicago buildings had steam chutes to send mail up

~~~
kasey_junk
Do you mean steam or do you mean pneumatic? I’ve never heard of steam
delivered mail but pneumatic was really popular.

[https://chicagology.com/chicagopostoffice/pneumatictubesyste...](https://chicagology.com/chicagopostoffice/pneumatictubesystem/)

------
electricslpnsld
Our apartment building in Manhattan had one of these, it was super fun to
fill! We also had a garbage chute... guess which one was more likely to get
clogged when it was 98 degrees and 90% humidity mid August

~~~
mirimir
Hey, I was going to mention garbage chutes. I lived briefly in a building with
them, and there were occasional chute fires. At least some intentional, I'm
guessing.

------
renewiltord
I used one in a building in downtown SF. Works like a charm.

------
cafard
Washington, DC, has mail chutes in some buildings. When I first saw one, a co-
worker, a New York native, said that she'd never use one, that no New Yorker
would, because people pour Coca Cola etc. down them.

The building where I work now has them. I don't use them, mostly because it's
convenient to use to box in the lobby.

------
waterfowl
Are these that unusual/dated? I read the article and couldn't tell if these
are distinct from mail chutes in general. Both my home and office buildings in
DC have them and they're neither very like, historic grand buildings.

Pretty sure the house and senate office buildings also both contain these.

~~~
supertrope
Contemporary fire code considers laundry and mail chutes weak points for a
fire spreading between floors. First class mail volume peaked in 2001.
[https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/first-
class...](https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/first-class-mail-
since-1926.htm)

~~~
wahern
I work in a 10-story building built in the 1890s, one of the first
"skyscrapers" in San Francisco. The mail chute system is blocked, and the
beautiful iron staircases have been boxed in at every level with fire
resistant doors and walls. AFAIU, in both cases one of the primary reasons was
fire safety, according to the leasing agent.

However, I know of at least one other building in this area, the Hobart
Building, slightly younger but much taller, where the iron staircases are
still open and still serve their aesthetic function. It makes taking the
stairs so much more pleasant.

Apparently the fire risk is manageable. I think a bigger problem is that these
building were designed for a multitude of small office suites. But today most
of these buildings will have (or _want_ to have) tenants who wish to lease
entire floors, or most of a floor. Large, open, but single tenant floor spaces
are how most modern office towers are constructed, so that's the market
expectation.[1] It's difficult to provide such tenant spaces while also
keeping open corridors between floors. Even for mail chutes, as the private,
controlled-access floors diminish the desirability and utility of shared
facilities.

[1] The nearby Crown Zellerbach Building (1959,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Bush_Plaza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Bush_Plaza))
was at the vanguard of this office tower design evolution.

------
moonka
Before Covid my office was in Smith Tower in Seattle. My first week I sent a
letter through the mail chute on our floor and was delighted when it showed up
home a few days later. Smith Tower's are similar to the one shown in the
picture of the Roosevelt hotel.

------
CodeWriter23
OT for this thread but perhaps of interest to others on HN. What a massive
Anti-user pattern for the cookie opt-out on that site. I literally could not
opt out with my iPhone.

------
shmerl
This style (Art Deco?) always reminds me of Bioshock.

------
solotronics
What would be a modern analogy of this I wonder?

~~~
fsckboy
trash chutes! tall buildings today, especially in NYC but many other places
too, have trash chutes on every floor. It's very satisfying to open the door
and hear my bag of kitchen trash hit the sides as it falls 250+ feet and slams
into the bottom (which is a chute into a trash compactor)

one company that cleans them is called 1-800-CHUTE-ME

there is also a button in the elevator called "taxi". if you push it, it
lights a red light on the end of the awning over the sidewalk out front. Back
in the day, a taxi could notice it and stop. You see them around NYC but the
taxis don't really pay attention to them any more.

~~~
Nextgrid
Are trash chutes still a thing? Back in France I've seen the existing ones in
the older buildings being sealed, presumably due to hygiene concerns (and they
are valid - all the chutes I've seen were disgusting and presumably a breeding
ground for all kinds of nastiness) and no modern buildings seem to have them.

~~~
waste_monk
I would think it's more to prevent fire from moving easily between floors, and
perhaps for HVAC efficiency reasons.

~~~
fsckboy
the trash chute doors on each floor are spring loaded, close automatically,
and have a gasket seal, and they are inspected and kept up to spec. they are
also in a closet behind an ordinary "residential" fire proof door like the
apartment doors. Sealing in/out odor also stops airflow, happy coincidence.

there are other ventilation systems that move air all over the building (they
bring it in from outside, filter it, condition it, and pump it into hallways
(elevator lobbies) up and down the building; it travels under the apartment
front doors, and it is sucked out the bathroom vents; it is called "make-up
air") These other fans and vent systems also shut down and seal and seal if
heat/smoke/fire is detected.

buildings are intricately balanced mechanical engineering systems where all
the parts are intertwined

