apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

phone

OMG I have one one of these and I've always wondered what it was! Why don't they just take these things out and replace them with something useful?

I have one of those little doors that I can only assume was used for milk delivery. It's been reinforced shut & painted over multiple times. I wish it still opened so it could be my Zappos delivery portal.

haha.... her Zappos delivery portal made me laugh hahaa...:)

The little door going out to the hall or backdeck area was used for either Milk or Ice Delivery...

I too wish mine still opened, but it makes a greast place to keep the toaster.

I have one of thes in my apartment in near working condition. It is part of an old intercom system. It is like the old phones that have a stationary part and the other part on a cord. The ear or voice piece would hang on the hook. Lifting it let's you anwer talk et cetara like a regular phone. I have some pictures of what it looks like if you are interested.

Does anyone know how to get those separate tub stoppers to work? It is the only way to close up the drain in my tub, I think....

it's an intercom. what's left of it.

These are some of the best things about old apartments! I have a deafening doorbell that has a whole apparatus on the wall of my kitchen, it's so cool.

it was a phone device, probably used within the building as an intercom. the hook was for holding the receiver (the piece you hold up to your ear to listen); when you lifted it off the hook, it connected the device to the line. the wire for the receiver would have run from the tiny hole below the hook, and the round curvy part was for speaking into.

I had a little painted-over door in my old apt, but since air/fire escape was on the other side, I figured it was a cold storage bin? I also had a painted-over dumbwaiter (for trash?).

In my current building (1917), some of the apts still have the original built-in safes.

I have something very similar in my apartment which is not painted over. It is an intercom. There should be an earpiece, and the circular part should be the mouthpiece end (Maybe the paint is hiding this feature?). We have a counterpart in the entrance to our building next to everyone's doorbell. Unfortunately, mine is missing the earpiece and no longer functions.

LKFotography -

Ppppppplease put up a Flickr link or something so we can see what that looks like!

This stuff is so interesting. Apparently in my old building, apartments used to have butler's pantries with dumbwaiters.

hey cassis. you lift it up and twist it so it stays in the "up" position. that should close the drain. when you are done you twist it and lower it. that should open the drain.

i'm the son of a plumber man. and therefore, the only one who could ever reach you.

I discovered one of these intercoms waaay back in the cupboard of an apartment I just bought. Its brass and still has all the pieces intact, so I'm thinking of shining it up and re-installing it in the niche near the door where it used to live. The intercom itself of course has been replaced, but it would be nice to have it there as a conversation piece.

That hook and bumper thing is:

The bumper is a door stop (the door had a convex bit that fit into it) and the hook caught another hook type thing on the door to secure it open. My grandfather's home had those in it for the doors to be kept open to allow the breeze through without the threat of the doors slamming with the difference in pressure.

Another interesting device are these "lazy butlers" we have in some old Victorians here in San Francisco, used to open the door at the bottom of a long staircase. Not quite as useful now in the age of deadbolt locks, but fun to play with nonetheless.

We have, what I'm assuming, is a laundry shoot in our apartment. It was painted shut, but my husband pried it open. It is filled half way up with trash. And as the caretakers, I suppose it's up to us to clean it out... but, honestly, I don't really want to! Fossilized trash is really not my thing!

We also have a really rad telephone nook and all the original build-ins in the kitchen!

I have this strange metal contraption
http://www.naturalnews.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/radiator.jpg
on the floor in front of the window in my bedroom in my new place. I'm not sure what it is, so for now I'm just storing a jug of lighter fluid and some old fireworks on it.

@ Cassis--if your pull-up tub stopper mechanism has gone defunct and no longer works, you could also always remove the strainer trim from the drain (should have a single screw holding it on, if there is one at all) and get a rubber stopper. you can get them at any hardware store, and then at least you could still take a bath.

my parents used to have one of those post tub stoppers in their house. my brothers and i loved to play with it when we were kids -- we'd actually argue over who got to drain the tub!

When I was a kid, all the houses in our neighborhood had milk chutes - the little door that opened into a compartment where milk was delivered. We had our milk delivered in those days. It was also useful if you locked yourself out of the house. You just sent the youngest/smallest child through the chute to unlock the door. I remember my sister making the trip once.

I used to live in a building that was a converted World War II brothel a few blocks from the Halifax port that sailors would frequent. Every door along the narrow hallway had a number on it beside a coat hook (all now covered by eras of paint) and the living room had a beautiful old buzzer at the entryway.

I loved how much character the place had, but after moving in I couldn't help being a little creeped out imagining if these walls could talk!

milk delivery door

http://www.tucsonazrealestateblog.com/tucson-living/tucson-how-big-is-the-room/

In my 1928 apt I have a little metal compartment with metal door underneath my kitchen window. It was meant as an early fridge to keep things cool. It's caked over with paint, but I hope to bring it back to its glory days soon and use it to store potatoes.

I have that type of intercom/doorbell in my apartment. Your painted one is missing the (cloth-covered) cord with mouthpiece that hangs on the hook, as well as buttons, one that unlocks the front door downstairs (still works), and one that you can ask who it is first (haven't had any cooperation testing it). The bell is loud as f**K, and I really hate when there's a delivery, or last week, the police came by, and just hit all the bells until someone buzzes them in.

In my old apartment, there was a little door with a little latch in a wooden column that was in my closet. Someone shut it with a screw, so I unscrewed it to see what was inside, there was nothing inside, nothing up, nothing down. There were also gas lamp parts sticking out of some of the walls, and my original landlord had told me that the system hadn't been flushed when he bought it, and the whole pipes were full of gas. Kind of scary!

I think I've heard such things (alarms, pipes, knobs, etc.) that are still there but don't work called "nostalgia hooks." Google says something else is, ah well.

I have a newer apartment built in I think 1994 but it still has some odd things on the walls. I have about 6 flat plastic light switch covers screwed in random places on the walls. It looks like they were covering up holes in the wall with these. We also have a timer with several settings in our laundry/pantry/closet. We have no clue what this timer does.

@horseman -- funny, mine works the opposite way. When you twist it to make it stay up, it drains. When you let it drop down, it plugs tub.

Of course, it doesn't work well at all. Which I why I got one of those flat rubber disk stoppers that covers the drain opening. Let's me take nice hot baths on cold winter nights.

My office building has its old pneumatic tube system. You can't use them anymore, but it's funny to see the pipes randomly sticking out of various places in the building. Makes me think of the film BRAZIL. My apartment is new construction, so unfortunately no fun vintage stuff there.

Also, zanooka reminded me of a something I've been thinking of. Anyone else have a random wall switch in their homes that they can't figure out what its for? I have one in my art studio ... my dad's a contractor and even he hasn't been able to figure out what it does.

Another thing that was in my kitchen when I moved in was an outlet with the wrong holes. They updated that on one of the greatest days of my life, when all the old outlets got grounded and just because I asked, I got 4 more outlets put in.

I had this apartment that had this weird hole in the wall with this little horn thingy on it by the doorbell at the front door.
it took me months to find an identical hole upstairs (when you walked in our front door, you had to walk up a flight of stairs to get to our actual apartment).
It was a old-timey intercom system!!!!!!!!!! All it was was a tube that ran through the walls.
you can't even imagine the fun I had with friends/family/solicitors.
I'd hear a knock on the door and then whisper/speak/scream into my end of the hole and the person on our front stoop would get the bejesus scared out them!

I have one of those tub stoppers in my bathroom. When I first moved in, I thought the tub was clogged and called my landlord, who just pulled up the tub stopper to "unclog" the tub.

Now he permanently thinks I'm an idiot.

I lived in a converted hotel from the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, and each unit had a package safe, so that deliveries could be made while you were out - there was a door on the outside, and a door on the inside, and the outside door could only be opened if the inside door had been opened (so no one could come along and steal the packages...) I never got anything in mine, but it was neat that they still worked!

As has already been mentioned, it's part of an intercom. I had one in my old apartment in Chicago. The hook held a microphone that allowed you to speak to a visitor through a single speaker in the lobby.

The visitor, however, would talk to you through a horn connected directly to your apartment via pipes (I'm not kidding!). So you'd listen through the round opening and speak through the microphone. There were two systems in place - an electrical "many to one" system and a purely acoustic "one to one" system.

If you look around your friend's lobby, you should find a series of talking horns (they're probably just inexplicably openings now) near the doorbells or mailboxes. If one of you speaks into the other end, I bet it will still work!

After a bit of digging, I found a photo online (this one also features a doorbell): http://bit.ly/intercom

I have the same tub stopper... Until moving to NYC last year, I had never seen one.

DCE- great find!

I had one of these when I moved into my apartment a couple of years ago. We spent hours digging it out of the wall. There were burned, cloth wires behind it. We also had 60 years of wires upon wires to no where with no function. Lots of fun pulling those out.

I found pictures as well http://www.oldradioparts.com/pg5p54.jpg

Mine has the bells also. There aren't any holes in the lobby, but maybe they were where there are mailboxes are now?

I'm jealous of the package safe!

I have an apartment in a Baltimore rowhouse built in the 1880s and probably renovated in the 30's or early 40's. I have a very old breaker box in my kitchen that isn't in use anymore. It's down by the floor next to the radiator and it's just a plain white box with what looks like 5 big light switches.

In my living room there are two back plates from lighting fixtures, a sconce and probably a chandelier. They are interesting conversation pieces, particularly the sconce, as it resembles a breast! http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/4463/p6081030js2.jpg

I'm really fascinated by by the apartment next door though because they have a door that doesn't open! It doesn't have a knob and is completely sealed. Based on it's location and the odd shape of my bathroom I'd estimate it's about a 6'x8' space in the center of the building near the old fireplaces. It's really driving me crazy, I wish I could get in there and see what it's all about!

And lastly, out in the hallway there are push button switches which look really neat but don't actually work.

We are moving into a 100 year old apartment and it has an old circular combination safe recessed into the bedroom wall! Makes me day dream of what could be hiding in there,... we don't know the combo so we can't open it!

Horseman - genius comment.

From the sister of a plumber man. Not quite the same...

I had an odd sort of cap on the wall of my living room in my old apartment ... sort of like what you might put over the protruding post of a defunct ceiling light. It looked for all the world like a round breast with a nipple in the middle ... I joked about having someone paint a Picasso-esque, one-breasted woman on my wall that incorporated the thing into a mural. Finally, during a visit from the Con-Ed guy, I found out it was from an old gaslight! (Our building was from the 1860s.)

my grandmom had a metal hatch outside the backdoor where you'd drop your trash into the ground and the sanitation workers would empty it every week.

My house still has the old knob and tube electrical wiring. It's been ripped out everywhere but the closets.

My aunts house still has an icebox in the mudroom that has an outside opening so the iceman can just drop the ice in.

I love old contraptions like this. I never found anything interesting in my post-war bungalow, but I plan on putting in a dumbwaiter at some point - there are companies that still make them.

Also had actually started installing a pneumatic tube intercom system, using central vac tubing which's cheap. But the wife came home early & found my drilling into the bathroom floor & took issue with it. Since then we've had so many renos to the house I've given up on it for the moment.

I'd even bought whistles for each portal to blow, like on old naval ships, to alert the other end(s) to go to their tubes to speak.

My apartment building was built in 1913. There is a metal box with a door bolted to my bathroom wall. Inside are 6 wooden dowels that can be raised/lowered, and fanned out.

I'm guessing it's some kind of laundry rack.



http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v473/patty1h/P1010054-1.jpg

several people have correctly identified the old intercom but one (DCE) has the description backwards- the missing piece that hung on the hook was the earpiece and the round part on the wall in the microphone- just like the old time telephones- and believe me- I remember both when they were used!!

I've read more of the comments and it's as if I was reading a description of the way-Upper West Side Manhattan apartment that I grew up in and that my mother lived in until her death at 91. In our building, there were buzzers to each apartment in the outer lobby and you could talk back to the person buzzing with the intercom; the cold storage bin was exactly that- potatoes never grew eyes waiting to be used, so go for restoring yours. My sister and I also loved to play with the drain pipe in the bathroom (up to drain, down to bathe). The dumbwaiters were used to send trash down and grovery deliveries up. The chute is probably for trash also, I doubt it was for laundry. Thanks everyone for an enjoyable interlude!

the upper west side building I grew up in had those intercoms into the 1970s-- I can just barely remember them. Then the building went co-op-- and it all went away...

dumb waiters were outlawed in new york city in the 60s. So I've never seen one that worked. In my building, people still pay a lot of money to get them removed from their kitchens for the extra space.

Cheryl K, it might be possible that the sealed door you're referring to was a "carpenters' door." I lived in an old brownstone (1860's) in Park Slope, Brooklyn which had a sealed door like this on the 2nd and 3rd storeys, in the same location on each floor. If you could walk through those doors, you'd find yourself in a neighbor's brownstone. I have never been able to find any information about these except for what my landlady told me: carpenters' doors were used during construction of multiple connected homes (or apartments I guess) to facilitate construction of similar or identical residences on the upper storeys.

cupajo - that's your heater.

When my parents pulled up the dining room carpet of their 1939 Tudor, they found a foot buzzer, which was apparently used to call the maid in from the kitchen (which was just one room over.) It was wired into the floor. We also have a mystery timer at the basement steps.

shebahshebah: The door is right smack in the middle of the floorplan and based on the chunk of space missing from my bathroom I assumed it was a closet or maybe even an elevator shaft. It's possible it could be a carpenter's door of sorts, I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility.

Jane: I'm glad I'm not the only one with a breasted apartment! :)

Hi Patty1h, we must live in the same apartment building because I have the same towel rack in my bathroom. Have you tried taking it down? I cant even get mine opened because of the dumb plaster all over it. Do you live in Bay Ridge Brooklyn? I Just moved there and there is all kinds of WEIRD stuff in my apartment and I need help trying to figure it out.

We own a few old houses in Syracuse and each has something interesting in it. The one we live in is a 2-family, up and down, and we live in the up part. When doing a rehab, we discovered the place is all knob and tube wiring in great shape. We found where the wall sconces used to be and put in new (old) ones. We discovered where a ceiling light should have been - that's what the mystery light switch wanted to control. And we found the tubing for a speaking tube. A friend gave us his speaking tube whistle, just like what you see in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-sddwiHOVI We're still looking for something to put out by the front door, where we found a hole leading to the other end of the tin speaking tube. If anyone knows where I can procure another whistle, please let me know!

When I lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn in a building (I guess) from the 1920's the basement laundry room had upright racks that slid out from the wall with a gas heaters underneath. These "dryers" were not only free, but since the clothes were hung up instead of being tossed around they dried with less wrinkles!

hi...first off, im wondering...do those post tub drains have a technical name that you can properly google and find history on/more pics/etc? and are they native only to ny? my auntie has one in her home and my best friend has one in her astoria apartment. i was recently to a dr's office that still had the upper part of a water closet toilet with chain above the modern one. i thought that was cool. my grandmum's house had a cubby hole and a walled up spot for bootlegging in her cellar. plus old bricks that were older than the rest of the house due to a fire that happened before they lived there. it burned the place to the foundation. the new home was built atop it.

@patty1h....im wondering if maybe that wasnt sum kind of remnants from an ancient ironing board or maybe dryer for crinoline cages or sumthing...it looks like it may be missing things which woyld help decipher it. its kinda errie.

those intercom speaking horns seem cool. my friends apt. was from the 20's we think, so i doubt they'd have those but we'll have to go on a search for neat bits in her place. my hubby n i r planning to move to an apt. hopefully in the asian/indian district of flushing, wonder if we'd find a reasonably priced place with neat stuff like found here!

also,found this interesting -

http://www.thirteen.org/tenement/eagle.html

http://www.tenement.org/about.html

@sreina26 - could you share with us or post linksto your own blog with the wierd stuff? I'm really fascinated by these things and i'm sure others here would be also! Besides, it would be fun and you might get more help figuring out what you've got! Plz don't forget pics!