October 7, 1897, was a celebratory day in New York City, unless you happened to be one unfortunate tomcat. On that date, the United States Post Office Department completed the first test of the city’s pneumatic tube system, which used compressed air to send cylindrical containers filled with mail through a series of underground networks. The first mail tube took three minutes to cover the 7,500-foot round-trip journey from the main postal building to the New York Produce Exchange; inside, it held a Bible wrapped in an American flag, as well as copies of the U.S. Constitution and President William McKinley’s inaugural address. Other test shipments on that initial day were more creative.
“The carriers were not only a complete success for the transportation of first-class matter, such as letters, but equally satisfactory for the carriage of packages of every description, including a full suit of clothes, a package of books, a live cat in a cotton sack and [a] dozen … eggs, etc.,” wrote Second Assistant Postmaster General W.S. Shallenberger in a report. Shallenberger was rather liberal with his “etc.”: The other items included two magnum bottles of champagne and a large artificial peach in a basket for New York Senator Chauncey Depew, who was serving as master of ceremonies. Seeing the shipment, one spectator called out, “Chauncey, you’re a peach!”
The pomp and circumstance of this opening ceremony, in which the privately owned Tubular Dispatch Company turned its tubes over to the government, marked the beginning of the mail system’s five-decade run in New York. After that one line opened in 1897, the city’s pneumatic mail network grew to contain approximately 27 miles of tubes, which shuttled millions of letters across Manhattan and Brooklyn every day.
On December 31, 1953, however, the Post Office suspended the service, suggesting in a statement that it was “obsolete, unnecessary and excessively expensive.” The tubes have lain dormant ever since.
The 56-year history of New York’s pneumatic tube system is interesting in and of itself. The technology continues to capture the public’s imagination, evoking nostalgia for those of a certain age and appearing in movies like Paddington and television shows like “Loki” and “Lost” as a symbol of an alternate future or place that is “other.”
But chronicling the history of New York’s mail tube system also offers a lens for examining overarching social and political trends, from an uptick in unionization and the threat of McCarthyism to the perennial question of whether and how the government should outsource certain services to the private sector.