New York City’s Mail Chutes (2015) | Hacker News Reader

New York City’s Mail Chutes (2015)

atlasobscura.com

62 pointstonyedgecombe34 comments

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!

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.

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.

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.

Lol. Why a banana? That’s funny - of course not to the super.

No good explanation; I was maybe 8.

That's an adequate explanation in itself! At some point you go from thinking "why not", to thinking "why", and evidently you had not been through that transition!

But was the banana properly addressed?

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

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.

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.

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

Probably a good thing. Mail falling on top would likely break the dvd

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

Do you have any links? Sounds really interesting.

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...

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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) was at the vanguard of this office tower design evolution.

It's interesting it peaked in 2001 concidering a large part of NJ's mail system was essentially shut down for a few weeks. Not that NJ is that big, but it's big enough that I'd expect it to cause a 1-2% hit overall.

Mail chutes were a common feature of buildings for many years, and not only in New York City.

The sixth (1970) and seventh (1981) editions of Architectural Graphic Standards discuss them on the “Planning for Postal Service in Office Buildings” pages. From the latter:

  CHUTES: Used in buildings of at least four stories.
  The chute must be approximately 2 x 8 in. in cross
  section and extend in a continuously vertical line
  from the beginning point to the receiving box or
  mailroom. The interior of the chute must be access-
  ible throughout its entire length. Chutes installed
  in pairs are constructed with a divider and dual
  receiving boxes. Chutes are for first class mail only.

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.

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.

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

What would be a modern analogy of this I wonder?

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.

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.

For more than a decade, I've lived exclusively in modern U.S. buildings (built or fully renovated after 1999). I don't think that I've ever seen a building fitting this description that didn't have a trash chute.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com