Old school dumbwaiter

The neighbors living above us are renovating their kitchen, which has made our building a more interesting place for the last several weeks. First, a bunch of kitchen cabinet parts appeared in the basement (along with major appliances). Then the banging started. It isn't really that bad, since we spend a lot of our time in the very front of the house and the kitchen is in the very back of the house. Also, they never start before 8 a.m. Still, I can hear people hauling stuff up and down the stairs, and when I am in the kitchen, I can hear banging and drilling.

A few days ago, our neighbor came to ask if he could get into the dumbwaiter shaft in our kitchen. I was not aware that we had a dumbwaiter, but it sounded interesting to me, so I said it was fine as long as our landlord agreed. His request did solve the mystery of what the random door in the kitchen was for. It took the workmen a while to get the door open, since it had been sealed shut with several screws and years of paint. Once they got the door off, it was clear that the apartment next to ours had used wood to seal their part of the dumbwaiter shaft (likely to install shelves on their side). The workmen needed to do some drilling to get run their wires from upstairs down the shaft to the basement. Once that was completed, they put the door back in place.

I learned that our building is over 100 yrs old. When the upstairs apartment opened their dumbwaiter access door, they found a newspaper jammed in the door to keep it shut. The paper was from the 1940s, so the shaft had been closed up for a while. I went to the upstairs apartment to investigate further. From there, I could see the pulley and wheel used to operate the dumbwaiter (all manpower, no motor). I went down to the basement and found the actual dumbwaiter platform. The rope is no longer connected to the upstairs wheel, but a piece of it was still sitting on top of the platform. Our downstairs neighbor told me that these were used to bring trash down to the basement. Anyway, it is a pretty cool historical feature. Wikipedia has a decent little article on dumbwaiters, if you are interested in learning more.

Here is the rope fragment that remains at the top of the dumbwaiter platform (still tied around the large metal ring, used to raise and lower the device). The wooden rails used to guide the platform up and down are on the very edges of the picture. If you zoom in, you can see part of the label. If you can figure out any of what the label says, please post in the comments. It would be interesting to discover more.

Here is the dumbwaiter in the basement. There may have been a door here at one time, but now it is just an open hole, tucked behind a couple of water heaters. It is totally dark, but the camera flash really did a good job at making the details visible. The metal-covered cord in the upper left is my neighbor's new stove connection for the kitchen remodel. You can see the top of the dumbwaiter from the past pic (with the rope fragment). The device extends down as an empty box, so there is a place for items to go when they are transported. The box is open on both sides, since apartments from both sides would use the same dumbwaiter.

This view looks up the dumwaiter shaft from the basement. You can see the rails on the left and right of the shaft. The newer-looking wood at the top is where the shaft is closed off at our apartment level. Just before that, you can see the doors to the dumbwaiter for the 2 first floor apartments (bottom and top in the picture). The stove wire that is swirling free is the one that was just installed.

Here is the dumbwaiter door in our kitchen, once they got it open. We had no idea what it was (and it was clearly painted shut), so we had shelves in front of it. The stove is to the left and the window is to the right. As you can see, the opening is boarded up after a short distance.

Here is the wheel at the very top of the shaft (looking up from the upstairs access door). The dumbwaiter guide rails end here, and the hole in the center was used to guide the rope.