Content area
Full Text
With a mighty twist of a screwdriver, Jason Walters popped out a metal bracket and opened the mail chute on the third floor of 890 Broadway. He carefully removed a half-dozen letters that had been trapped inside so long that some envelopes were turning yellow.
Walters, the manager of the building, also extricated an empty bag of Frito-Lay potato chips, a used packet of grape jelly and the likely cause of the backup: a yellow Hi-Liter marker.
"I think the chute has been jammed since 1990," said Roseanne Forni, office manager for the American Ballet Theatre, a building tenant, as she watched Walters work. But another onlooker who works at 890 Broadway, Ballet Tech Foundation operations director Maggie Christ, said the letters couldn't have been entombed that long because they had Forever stamps.
"The post office started selling those in 2007," Christ said. "I just checked on Wikipedia."
One of the excavated envelopes contained a Christmas card sent in December 2016 by Stacy Yoshioka of Washington Heights to friends in Wyckoff, N.J. Yoshioka, a dancer and personal trainer, remembered dropping the letter in the chute on the fifth floor after a dance rehearsal.
"I love mail chutes. They're so fun, and I'll go out of my way to use them," Yoshioka said. "But I wonder now how many other letters I've sent got stuck."
Modern living
Mail chutes were cutting-edge communications technology when the city's first was installed in the St. James Building at 1133 Broadway in 1898. They have saved New Yorkers countless trips to the lobby or corner mailbox by enabling them to drop letters from their office or apartment floor down a slender glass-and-metal shaft leading to a mailbox, where postal workers retrieve them.
The city had at least 900 active chutes as recently as 20 years ago, but the U.S. Postal Service doesn't keep count anymore. Some have been sealed shut, including those in Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building and the Waldorf-Astoria. But plenty remain in use, including in the St. James Building...