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crowdfundingcrowdfunding Creative Jam will run Saturday 17-Sunday 18 with a theme of "Memories." That will be our 150th Creative Jam, wow! I hope everyone shows up for it.
ephemeral_nyc_feedMail isn’t what it used to be. Digital payments are far more convenient than paper bills; texts and emails continue to replace actual cards and letters meant to be opened by human hands.
Luckily, one relic of an era when U.S. Postal Service delivery was an important conduit for information and connection endures: the elegant, embossed brass letter boxes in office towers and apartment buildings.
Ever stop to really appreciate these beauties—especially the ones with a mail chute visible, like the letter box in the top photo from 119 West 57th Street? These jewel boxes are easy to miss, sturdily affixed to the same facade or lobby wall for decades.
Their appearance in the early 20th century is due to a patent secured in 1883 by James Goold Cutler. In a world that was increasingly becoming more vertical, his mail chute and letter box allowed people living or working on the upper floors of new buildings to mail letters.
The Cutler company, based in Rochester, had a “virtual monopoly” on letter boxes “for the next 20 years,” wrote Luke Spencer in a 2015 Atlas Obscura post. Cutler letter boxes could be found in cities across the U.S.
As the skyscraper era dawned, “Cutler sold over 1,600 mail chutes, making their way into brand new, state of the art skyscrapers, office buildings, apartments, and hotels,” states Spencer. They also appeared in mass transit hubs like Grand Central Terminal, where the letter box in the second photo still remains.
For Cutler, beauty was as important as functionality. “He also had the foresight to collaborate with the leading architects of the day to allow the design of individual mail boxes that would match the grandeur of specific buildings,” wrote Spencer.
“Through the Beaux Arts movement to Art Nouveau, to Art Deco, Cutler’s mailboxes became increasingly beautiful and ornate.”
Some were beautiful in their simplicity, like the above letter box, which is attached to the facade of a 1920s apartment building on Sutton Place. Below is a similar letter box, found outside a Park Avenue apartment residence, but it has “mail early” directive embossed at the top.
The first sidewalk mailboxes in New York City were cast-iron letter boxes installed on lampposts in 1859. By the turn of the century, larger boxes for letters and packages appeared as sidewalk furniture, and these big blue boxes continue to serve as mail repositories today.
But there’s really no mailbox quite as exquisite as a Cutler letter box. Amazingly, Spencer found that about 900 were still in use in New York City at the time he wrote about them in 2015.
Fire codes have banned the chutes since the late 1990s, however, with fire officials fearing that the chutes could spread smoke, according to a 2019 U.S. Postal Service news post.
That might explain why most of these boxes are just that, minus the chute that made them so vital to 20th century apartment and office tower dwellers.
jaysbrickblog_feed2026 is going to be a massive year for Ninjago as the theme celebrates its 15th anniversary. LEGO have unveiled a brand new Ninjago 71860 Lloyd’s Titan Mech, releasing on 1 March 2026. This 1,293-piece model is a substantial update to the original 70676 Lloyd’s Titan Mech (hence this being in the Ninjago Legacy subtheme) […]
The post LEGO unveils a new 71860 Lloyd’s Titan Mech to celebrate 15th anniversary appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.
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ysabetwordsmith merriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 1, 2025 is:
pseudonym • \SOO-duh-nim\ • noun
A pseudonym is a name that someone (such as a writer) uses instead of their real name.
// bell hooks is the pseudonym of the American writer Gloria Jean Watkins.
Examples:
“Edgar Wright, the filmmaker and genre specialist who has given the world modern gems like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Baby Driver, estimates he was around 13 years old when he read ‘the Bachman Books,’ a collection of four novels that Stephen King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman during the early years of his career.” — Don Kaye, Den of Geek, 9 Oct. 2025
Did you know?
Pseudonym has its origins in the Greek adjective pseudōnymos, which means “bearing a false name.” French speakers adopted the Greek word as the noun pseudonyme, and English speakers later modified the French word into pseudonym. Many celebrated authors have used pseudonyms. Samuel Clemens wrote under the pseudonym “Mark Twain,” Charles Lutwidge Dodgson assumed the pseudonym “Lewis Carroll,” and Mary Ann Evans used “George Eliot” as her pseudonym.
bbcnewsworld_feedephemeral_nyc_feedIs it ever possible to get tired of exploring Manhattan’s little-known lanes and dead-end side streets?
Terraces in Washington Heights, alleys in the Financial District, courtyards in Greenwich Village—dozens of these little nooks and pockets exist amid some of the busiest avenues in the world.
Deep dives into the backstories of these historical remnants have been done by generations of writers and historians. But what do we know about the slender East Side block called Mitchell Place?
Never heard of Mitchell Place? It’s typically left out of guides to the city’s small, secretive places. This easy-to-miss stretch of pavement runs from First Avenue to Beekman Place on a bluff overlooking the East River in Turtle Bay.
Mitchell Place is an oddity. It isn’t a continuation of East 49th Street, which runs across First Avenue to the East River at a lower level. Mitchell Place is an entity of its own on an incline flanked by 20th century residential buildings on one side and an iron fence on the other.
Quiet and with almost no foot traffic, Mitchell Place is surrounded by the modern city, from the United Nations to the south to the FDR Drive on the east to the buses and taxis jostling their way out of the traffic tunnel on First Avenue.
But dial your imagination back to the mid-19th century before Mitchell Place began appearing on street maps. It’s not aligned to the city street grid, so why did it emerge, and who lived there?
The best guess is that it came out of the destruction and carving up of the Colonial-era Beekman family mansion and estate.
This landmark house (below), built in 1763-1764 by wealthy and prominent merchant James Beekman, served first as a family country home, then the British headquarters during the Revolutionary War after the Beekmans fled. (George Washington reportedly stopped in after the Battle of Brooklyn and warned the Beekman family about the impending invasion.)
Known as Mt. Pleasant, the house was abandoned again by the Beekmans during a cholera epidemic in 1854. It was demolished two decades later, not long after the Beekmans created a new street, Beekman Place, on the grounds of their estate.
The land from the estate was sold to developers, who built brownstones for well-to-do families. Likely to maximize real estate potential, two streets were cut between Beekman Place and First Avenue. One, Dunscombe Place, became East 50th Street, according to Valentine’s Manual of Old New York. The second was Mitchell Place.
The Mitchell name is another mystery. According to Henry Moscow’s The Street Book, Mitchell Place takes its moniker from esteemed 19th century jurist William Mitchell (below right). The presiding justice of the New York State Supreme Court, Mitchell retired in 1857, states Moscow, and the street took his name in 1871.
Mitchell made his own home miles away on West Ninth Street, per his 1886 obituary in the New-York Tribune. Perhaps Mitchell traveled in the same elite circle as the Beekmans, and they named the street. Or it honors another Mitchell, a family name dating to 18th century New York City.
To confuse things further, references to real estate dealings on Mitchell Place (below) began appearing in city newspapers in the 1860s, years before the street was supposedly named.
Through the later decades of the 19th century, Manhattan’s East Side changed, and Mitchell Place changed with it. Working-class residents employed by the area’s factories and slaughterhouses replaced more elite homeowners. Brownstones were carved up into flathouses with stores on the ground floor.
And then something weird appeared in the press in 1896. Apparently, the city had no record of Mitchell Place and did not recognize it as an actual Manhattan street, several papers reported.
“Found a new street in this city,” read a New York Times front-page headline. “The Board of Street Openings and Improvements discovered a new street yesterday whose existence had not before been known to this board.”
Mitchell Place was described by the Times as a private street. “When they examined the matter, it was found that not one of the persons who own the street is assessed anything by the Tax Commissioners,” continued the Times.
Residents started paying taxes, Mitchell Place went public (if it was really private to begin with), yet it suffered from neglect. The street “was guiltless of paving blocks or macadam,” reported The World in 1897, which added that it “is the dumping ground of all the rubbish in the vicinity.”
What changed Mitchell Place’s fortunes? The early 20th century renovation of Beekman Place back into a fashionable enclave, with fancifully restored townhouses and elegant apartment residences.
As an even smaller lane adjacent to Beekman Place, Mitchell Place saw the fall of its shabby brownstones and the rise of new real estate (above photo).
Since the 1920s, only two buildings actually carry a Mitchell Place address. The first is the apartment house at Number 10, formerly known when it was completed in 1928 as Stewart Hall. French Modernist painter Henri Matisse was known to spend time there.
The second is the Panhellenic Tower, now the Beekman Tower, which went up between 1927-1929 (above). Originally a female-only apartment house for college graduates, this Art Deco skyscraper has served as a suites hotel in recent years with a rooftop nightspot.
Few New Yorkers would have a reason to find themselves on this narrow, almost hidden street elevated above the hustle of contemporary Manhattan.
But if you do, take in the incredible view of the East River and the 1920s vibe of its few buildings, born from a country estate in the wilds of colonial-era Turtle Bay.
[Fourth image: MCNY, MNY136286; fifth image: The Street Book; sixth image: New York Herald; seventh image: NYPL Digital Collections]
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