Old lobby mailboxes reflect beauty of classic Minneapolis skyscrapers

Email doesn’t exist. You have an inbox, except you don’t; there’s no lid to lift to see if the mail has arrived. And, you don’t send an email by shoving it through a slot. Email is functional, frictionless, instantaneous and much easier than physical mail. What it lacks most is what it needs the least: beauty.

Well, what did beauty have to do with the old mail? A lot. There’s a simple practical beauty in the old blue mailboxes that stood on the street, looking patient and self-contained, but they lacked adornment.

To find beauty in the simple act of posting a letter, you head downtown to an old building, wander over to the elevator bank, and look for a Cutler mailbox. You can’t miss it: There’s a glass chute attached, rising into the mysteries of the floors above.

The sturdy boxes, usually a few feet across, had designs often tailored to the style of the building. The Medical Arts Building (825 Nicollet Mall) had the popular Skyscraper Gothic style, and the mailbox matched it.

Minneapolis’s finest late 1920s structures have lovely examples. The mailbox for the Foshay Tower (821 Marquette Av. S.) is obscured behind the check-in counter, looking like a disused relic. The style is pure art deco, with all the stylized floral designs found elsewhere in the lobby.

The Rand Tower’s interiors are more refined and stripped down, and the large mailbox looks like a door that opens up into the Jazz Age.

You might think the Baker Building (now the 706 Building in Baker Center, 7th Street and 2nd Avenue S.) had a lot of doctors, since the box has staff-and-snakes caduceus we associate with the medical profession. Actually, no. The staff was the symbol of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, so it was a fine fit for the mail as well.

Every mailbox, and the chutes that fed them, bore the name of the patent holder: Cutler Manufacturing Co., a Rochester, N.Y.-based firm founded by James G. Cutler, who was an architect who later became the city’s mayor. The company catalog for 1917 relates its history. The mail chute was introduced in 1883, just in time for the skyscraper boom. In 1884, the company installed four chutes. Nineteen years later, around 1,600 were in use. In 1917, the company asserted, “there is no office building or hotel of any consequence in the United States which is not equipped with this modern convenience.”

It took awhile to get the postal authorities on board.

“The United States Post Office authorities did not recognize the Mail Chute,” said the company history, because they had the monopoly on mailboxes. A letter was not considered “mailed” until it was dropped into the box. If it got stuck on the way down, it was the building’s responsibility to free it. The chutes could not say “U.S. Mail.” A letter in the chute lived in legal limbo.

In 1893, the post office relented — as long as it supervised the production and installation. The lobby boxes had a government-approved lock. Letters dropped in the chute were now considered “legally mailed.”

But people still put bulky items down the chute. Drop and forget, unconcerned that some thick folded pamphlet on the fourth floor might catch everything from 20 floors above. What to do? So, a new regulation was introduced: All chutes must have a glass front, with a removable panel that could be opened only by a special key, entrusted to a building employee of exemplary character.

The 1917 brochure also noted that the chutes practically paid for themselves because employees no longer needed to go to the lobby to mail a letter. It was probably not to save on elevator costs but because tenants expected them. They were the latest technological innovation.

Email didn’t hasten the demise of the chutes.

The National Fire Protection Association issued new codes in 1997 that banned chutes because smoke could climb up through tunnels. The codes were voluntary, but influential. While thousands remain in use across the country, the decline of physical mail and the effect on work-from-home on office tenancy means that the sight of a letter fluttering down the chute will be as rare as a falling star.

But even if the letter goes the way of the telegram, the boxes will still remain in many lobbies. No longer a portal to the outside world, but a grave marker.