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’. 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.Though the tubes were officially retired in 2016, as of 1998 the New York's main library was still installing new systems. And though no one gets to use them anymore, you can still see the antique pipes in the NY Humanities and Social Sciences Library. I loved going to the Rose Room's desk and submitting requests magically transported to the subterranean stacks beneath the library containing over four million books. I sat on a bench waiting for my request to be posted on the iconic arrival. Scholarship for the masses. Earlier this year 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