#Chutes

[primepaginequotidiani]

PRIMA PAGINA Equipe di Oggi lunedì, 10 febbraio 2025

[tameblog]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[ramestoryworld]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[alexha2210]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[angusstory]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[tumibaba]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[romaleen]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[monaleen101]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[iamownerofme]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[shelyold]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[iammeandmy]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[januishstory]

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.Send it down the chuteDuring the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).A linen chute at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1930sA sanitary and safer solutionLaundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.A step forward for homemakersDomestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement."This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."The laundry chute’s downfallInterestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/AlamyRelated Reading: Source link

[drchristophedelongsblog]

Hydrocéphalie à pression normale et troubles de la marche chez les personnes âgées

L'hydrocéphalie à pression normale (HNP) est une maladie neurologique qui se caractérise par une accumulation excessive de liquide céphalo-rachidien (LCR) dans les ventricules du cerveau. Bien que la pression intracrânienne soit normale, cette accumulation peut entraîner divers symptômes, dont des troubles de la marche chez les personnes âgées.

Causes de l'hydrocéphalie à pression normale

Les causes exactes de l'HNP ne sont pas toujours connues, mais certains facteurs de risque ont été identifiés, notamment :

Âge: L'HNP est plus fréquente chez les personnes âgées.

Sexe: Les femmes sont plus touchées que les hommes.

Antécédents de traumatisme crânien: Un traumatisme crânien antérieur peut augmenter le risque de développer une HNP.

Méningite: Une inflammation des méninges (les membranes qui enveloppent le cerveau et la moelle épinière) peut entraîner une HNP.

Hémorragie sous-arachnoïdienne: Un saignement dans l'espace sous-arachnoïdien (l'espace entre les méninges) peut entraîner une HNP.

Symptômes de l'hydrocéphalie à pression normale

Les symptômes de l'HNP peuvent varier d'une personne à l'autre, mais les plus courants sont :

Troubles de la marche: C'est l'un des symptômes les plus fréquents de l'HNP. Les personnes atteintes peuvent ressentir une instabilité, une démarche ébrieuse ou une difficulté à maintenir l'équilibre.

Incontinence urinaire: L'incontinence urinaire peut être un symptôme précoce de l'HNP.

Perte de mémoire: La perte de mémoire peut être un symptôme tardif de l'HNP.

Douleurs de tête: Les douleurs de tête peuvent être présentes, mais elles ne sont pas toujours un symptôme de l'HNP.

Diagnostic de l'hydrocéphalie à pression normale

Le diagnostic de l'HNP repose sur plusieurs examens, notamment :

Imagerie par résonance magnétique (IRM) du cerveau: L'IRM est l'examen de référence pour le diagnostic de l'HNP. Il permet de visualiser les ventricules élargis et de mesurer la pression intracrânienne.

Ponction lombaire: Une ponction lombaire peut être réalisée pour mesurer la pression du liquide céphalo-rachidien et analyser son composition.

Traitement de l'hydrocéphalie à pression normale

Le traitement de l'HNP dépend de la gravité des symptômes et de la cause sous-jacente. Dans certains cas, aucun traitement n'est nécessaire. Dans d'autres cas, les options de traitement peuvent inclure :

Médicaments: Les diurétiques peuvent être utilisés pour réduire la production de liquide céphalo-rachidien.

Chirurgie: Une shunt ventriculaire peut être implanté pour drainer le liquide céphalo-rachidien vers l'abdomen ou le péritoine.

Prévention de l'hydrocéphalie à pression normale

Il n'existe pas de moyen de prévenir l'HNP, mais il est important de consulter un médecin si vous présentez des symptômes tels que des troubles de la marche, de l'incontinence urinaire ou une perte de mémoire.

Conclusion

L'hydrocéphalie à pression normale est une maladie qui peut entraîner des troubles de la marche chez les personnes âgées. Si vous êtes concerné par cette maladie, il est important de consulter un médecin pour obtenir un diagnostic et un traitement appropriés.

Aller plus loin

[thedailymobile]

“Hit Me With Your Best Chute”

© EricBrazier.com

[domloisirsetculture]

[:fr]Chutes de Trafalgar[:]

[:fr] Bienvenue sur l’île de la Dominique, nous voici au niveau des chutes de Trafalgar. Itinéraire Pour accéder au point de départ des chutes, il faut vous orienter du côté de la ville de Roseau sur l’île puis direction Trafalgar. Il vous faudra environ 20 à 30 minutes depuis Roseau pour accéder au point de départ. Précautions avant votre départ, prenez de quoi payer l’entrée (14 dollars…

[tallulaah]

Saint-Laurent-Le-Minier