Pneumatic Tubes

“WHEN A YOUNG MAN IN Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love letter gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube–pfft–just like that.” — E.B. White, ‘Here Is New York’.

At the turn of the last century the pneumatic tube system was once an essential part of New York life. Cylinders containing letters, packages, or at least in one case a live cat, were shot through tubes by air pressure, at a rate of 35 mph, and these tubes ran all over New York. Up to 1998 the New York's main library still installed new systems. The tubes were officially retired in 2016 and though no one gets to use them anymore, although the antique pipes are still in the NY Humanities and Social Sciences Library.

Back in the last century I loved going to the Rose Room's desk after searching through library card catalogues for a book on interest and after submitting a request I and other scholars sat on a bench awaiting our books to be elevated from the subterrranean stacks containing over four million books. Scholarship for the masses.

In 2021 I was accepted as a research scholar at The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division. As a child I haunted the attic of my grandmother's house in Westbrook Maine. Thousands of National Geographics. I visited hundreds of faraway lands, dreaming of see them in the flesh. I have been blessed to have seen the world then and now. Oh, the glory of studying the world in the Rose Room.