CHICAGO — Harold King gingerly inserts a long metal tool into the mail chute on the 28th floor of the Civic Opera House tower and eases out several envelopes jammed inside.
King, a letter-box mechanic for the U.S. Postal Service, displays the culprit — an oversize envelope that had been folded and stuffed into the chute on a higher floor, despite notices warning against such foolishness.
"People don't pay any attention to the signs," says King, who says postal workers are called to unclog the twin chutes at this 72-year-old landmark at least twice a week. Trusting valuable mail to a chute "is like committing suicide," he adds. "If it was something important, I'd take it downstairs myself."
Mail chutes, in theory, are a marvel of gravity-harnessing convenience. Typically extending from the top floor to a box in the lobby, the thin metal-and-glass shafts allow tenants to slip envelopes into a slot on each floor and save themselves a trip downstairs.
The reality is slightly messier. Oversize mail is often deposited. Envelopes lodge crosswise. Other stuff piles up above. Pretty soon, it's an acute case of postal impaction. If nobody notices, letters can stack up for days, weeks — or longer.
Some years ago, 40,000 pieces of mail backed up in a chute at the 50-story McGraw-Hill Building in New York, trapped between the lobby and a basement. They finally resorted to surgery: Removing cinder blocks between floors. The resulting avalanche of mail filled 23 postal sacks.
Frustration with such clogs has led to a slow but inexorable death for the venerable chutes. Bill Hind, property manager of the McGraw-Hill Building in New York, has shut down all four of its main chutes. The Chrysler Building in New York closed its chutes a few years ago, after repeated jams. So did the old RCA building, the 70-story tower that looms over the famous Rockefeller Center skating rink. Chicago's 100-story John Hancock Center, built in 1970, sealed its chutes about a decade ago when they couldn't digest all the mail.
Almost every major building had at least one. The Waldorf-Astoria hotel had three; Philadelphia's City Hall, seven. Prominently placed in every lobby, the receiving boxes were often made of bronze and grandly decorated with scrolls, eagles and such. But as mail volume increased and big tenants established their own mail rooms, the devices gradually fell out of favor. Few new chutes have been built since 1980. The National Fire Protection Association's voluntary code has banned them in new construction since 1997 because the vertical shafts can act like chimneys, quickly spreading smoke up through a building.
Even so, the post office estimates that there are more than 900 active chutes in Manhattan and the Bronx. The 102-story Empire State Building has four functioning chutes dropping from different levels. About 360 buildings in Chicago retain their chutes. And hundreds more are scattered about the world.
That means lots of jams. Most can be traced to a simple confluence: Big envelope meets small IQ. "People will double-fold an envelope and triple-fold it, somehow figuring that if they get it into the chute, it'll stay that way without unfolding and go straight down," says Gary Wood, a vice president of Lurie Co., which owns the building at 120 S. LaSalle St. here in Chicago. The 73-year-old Chicago tower closed its chutes a few years ago after repeated clogs.
Most jams are cleared in a few days. But occasionally a letter gets stuck much longer. In 1995, a Brooksville, Fla., woman named Marguerite Grisdale Lynch received a letter from her husband 50 years after he had dropped it in a chute in a Michigan veterans hospital, and 19 years after he died. It was one of 21 letters trapped between the fourth and fifth floors, and discovered when the building was being renovated.
Another widow received two letters from the same World War II time warp — one written by her husband to her, and another he had posted to a girlfriend with whom he was having an affair. Michael Schragg, postmaster in Marshall, Mich., who helped find recipients for some of the old letters, says the woman's daughter called postal officials to complain that the long-buried secret had upset her mother, who was in her 70s. "It's a good thing Dad is dead," Schragg says the daughter said. "Because when she found out, she'd have shot him."