The Mail Chute
1883 · Building Mail Chute · Work 550 of 1,871
A narrow brass and glass channel running down a marble lobby wall, a single envelope caught in mid-fall behind the glass, a hopper with a hinged brass mouth at shoulder height, a plain engraved brass plate above it, the channel descending to a brass letter box at floor level, a tall window on the left throwing daylight across the marble and brass, gas pendants with etched glass globes along the lobby ceiling, a plain reception desk and a brass-railed stair beyond, the lobby running back into shadow with dark unlit figures at its far end.
- What it was used for
- A mail chute is a vertical tube running from the upper floors of an office building down to a receiving box on the ground floor; whoever posts a letter upstairs need not go down to the post office. In 1883 James G. Cutler of Rochester obtained patent no. 284,951 on the receiving box of the system. The Smithsonian National Postal Museum lists the requirements for that box: made of metal, distinctly marked "U.S. Letter Box", with a door hinged on one side whose bottom is at least two feet six inches above the floor. The first chute was installed in Rochester in 1884; the museum states that Cutler's firm was the sole manufacturer until 1904 and produced more than 1,600 receiving boxes in those twenty years.
- What was new
- What was new was not the letter box but the way to it: the building itself became the feeder for the mail, and a twenty-storey office block got a single posting point that existed on every floor. That turned a fixture inside a private building into a matter for the post office: in 1893 Congress placed all chutes under the exclusive custody of the Post Office Department, and every installation fell under its regulations; by 1905 chutes were permitted in hotels over five storeys and in apartment houses with more than 50 apartments. The barb: the mail got stuck. Atlas Obscura reports a jam in the McGraw-Hill building whose contents filled 23 mail sacks, and writes that by the 1990s fire codes had all but outlawed new Cutler chutes in new buildings.