Hello!

Last week I explained the rise of New York City’s pneumatic mail system. Today I’ll share its downfall, and also some details on the dangers of managing the tubes.

While proponents of the system testified that accidents were few, accidents still decidedly happened. In February 1898, 600 letters were damaged or destroyed when a carrier opened up mid-journey, though approximately 260 were recovered and sent to their proper destinations. One of the lines also had to be shut down in March of that year because of excessive moisture.

In 1903, the system had a fatal accident. Two workers were seeing to a clog and uncovered a crack in one of the tubes. When the post office sent through a test before they were out of the area, the tube burst and pinned the men. One died from his wounds while the other had his right side crushed.

Breakdowns were more frequent. When they happened, maintenance workers repaired the system at no small personal risk. One icy day, a worker had to pick his way over a 12-inch catwalk alongside the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge to remove a blockage with denatured alcohol—an ironic choice of material during Prohibition. Another construction worker accidentally drilled through a tube and, thinking it was a gas pipe, promptly lost his finger when he stuck it in the hole to prevent gas from leaking.

But clearing blockages in the pipes didn’t always involve scrambling across the Brooklyn Bridge. If mail got stuck, so-called Saturday afternoon Grunters were called upon to get things moving again. A four-person team would go out on Saturdays, when the tubes were less busy, to track down leaks in the pipes, which affected the air pressure inside and created blockages. One of the men, the Grunter, would grunt into the tube while two of his colleagues sat on the other side of the blockage. The fourth man used a stopwatch to determine how long the Grunter’s echo took to make it to them. Doing so helped them locate the leak; alternatively, workers in Philadelphia fired a pistol into the tube and listened for the bullet’s echoes. (I’m not an engineer, but Philadelphia’s method seems… less than optimal.)

It was the cost of running the tube system, however, that ultimately caused it to close.

In 1938, an uptick in laborers unionizing likely played a part in New York City’s decision to take direct control of its pneumatic mail system. In February of that year, workers at the New York Mail and Newspaper Transportation Company sought union representation. They hoped to earn higher wages, as they worked 60 hours each week, while Post Office employees worked 44 hours. The company resisted, saying the pay bump would cost an additional $135,000. Management also challenged the union’s right to collectively bargain but lost.

As a result of the failed negotiations, the company shunted some of its employees over to the Post Office; effective March 2, 1938, just a week after the National Labor Relations Board confirmed the union’s collective bargaining rights, the Post Office assumed responsibility for paying the workers who operated the tube system, as well as providing the power to run it. The private company kept the workers who performed maintenance on its payroll and continued to own the pipes directly.

The costs of the system, however, remained high, and its continued funding remained controversial. On April 28, 1950, the line connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan was cut off after the reconstruction of the Brooklyn Bridge. And in 1953, Postmaster General Summerfield shut all of New York’s tubes down for good. “One of the things that we soon came upon was the apparent excessive cost of handling mail by the tube system,” Summerfield said in his 1953 annual report to Congress, later adding that “the cost of operation, which is something like a million dollars a year, could be practically eliminated.”

Rather than canceling the contract, Summerfield conducted a test in early December 1953 to see how New York City’s mail would run without the tubes. The letters made it to their final destinations with ease, said Summerfield in a press release. “The mail can be satisfactorily handled by the addition of two trucks at a yearly cost of about $25,000 a year,” the postmaster general explained. “These two trucks will adequately replace the tube service, which now costs the government a total outlay of approximately $1,000,000 a year.”

Summerfield canceled the contract on December 31, 1953, ending the pneumatic system that Wanamaker started more than 50 years prior.

The closure of New York City’s mail tube system reverberated beyond the end of 1953. In February 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy — then on the cusp of losing the unchecked power he’d wielded over the Senate during his hunt for communist influences in the U.S. — said he would consider holding public hearings about Senator Hubert Humphrey’s support of the tube postal service. McCarthy said he suspected “something worse than stupidity was involved” in the approval of a 10-year contract signed in 1950. But those hearings never took place, and the political fighting around the tube system soon faded away.

Later, in June 1957, the New York Mail and Newspaper Transportation Company sued for breach of contract. Their case failed in U.S. Claims Court in a 3-2 decision, with former Supreme Court justice Stanley F. Reed — filling in for a judge who disqualified himself for the case — writing the majority opinion. The company appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but was not picked up by the institution. J. Lee Rankin, a champion of desegregation who went on to serve as general counsel in the inquiry of President John F. Kennedy's 1964 assassination, wrote the opposing brief to their petition in his role as U.S. Solicitor General.

Today, the pipes lay dormant under the streets of New York City, if they haven’t been dug up and destroyed in the intervening decades. And other than an apparently failed attempt to have them house fiber optic cables in 2001, they live on only as part of the city’s history — a remnant of a technology that many at the turn of the 20th century thought would be around for centuries.

Pneumatic tubes still conjure up wistfulness for a bygone era and its vision of the future. New York City’s pneumatic mail system encapsulated that vision, even if it didn’t quite come to pass. “Anything which increases speed adds to the sum of human happiness,” said Depew, the New York senator who presided over the city’s first successful test of the tubes, in 1897. “Speed, with electricity, with the telegraph, with the telephone, gives to the busy man a vast multiplication of power.”

He added, “When the system is complete throughout Greater New York, a message or a parcel can be delivered to any part of the city in less than 20 minutes. … The one pregnant and overwhelming fact, dispelling all the doubts connected with the pneumatic tube and its possibilities, is that the pneumatic tube is a howling success.”

Parts of this post originally appeared in my article for smithsonianmag.com, published on December 22, 2023.

Thanks for reading! Next week I’ll have a sillier story headed your way…

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