DUMBWAITER

  What in the world is it?

What in the world is a dumbwaiter??

     “Esther!” The shout echoes as if through a tunnel, garbled yet distinct.

     The metallic clank of the lock sliding sideways, the heave of the door opening.

      “I’m here, Julie!”

      I close and lock the door to the apartment, dropping my schoolbag on the hallway table.  Rounding the bend in the hall, I catch the familiar sight of my mother’s back as it leans into the opening in the wall, into which her head and neck have disappeared. Deep in conversation with my aunt, who lives directly upstairs, my mother seems to barely register my arrival home from school.

      It is the late 50s, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, and my mother and aunt are indulging in their daily conversation – not via text or cellphone – neither of which existed then – or even landline phone, when each call costs money. Their means of communication – convenient, affordable (meaning free), and dependable – is the dumbwaiter.

      Does anyone these days even know what a dumbwaiter is? Picture a fairly large window set into the hallway wall. A doorway, which blends in with the wall when closed, covers this window, and is only opened for two possible purposes. The first is the disposal of garbage, which is actually the intended purpose of this dumbwaiter. Sometimes, the super downstairs sends the container up to the apartments and the occupants deposit their garbage and send it on down; sometimes, the occupant can summon the container by pulling on a chord.

      The second, unintended purpose of the dumbwaiter, however, is the one that left the greatest impression on my young memory. That is the regular shouts between my mother and aunt, in the apartment above ours, followed by often-lengthy conversations. All spilling out into the dark shaft hidden behind that strange doorway in the wall.

      What did they talk about? I guess whatever gets talked about at any coffee klatch, or during any normal phone conversation these days. I’m going to the grocery, or the bakery. Do you need anything? Can you send up (or down) an ingredient I need for a recipe? (Yes, they occasionally used the dumbwaiter to transfer items to each other, their personal pony express, though they usually instructed one of the children to be a messenger.)  Did you speak with Mamma today? They would gossip and laugh. I think they believed that talking through the dumbwaiter instead of actually visiting each other during the day meant that they were not neglecting their housewifely and motherly duties, as they were still ensconced in their own apartments, wearing their aprons.

     I don’t remember exactly when I developed a fear of that dumbwaiter. I did, of course, recognize it as a technological invention that saved us all from having to bring our garbage downstairs and outside to cans. And I did grow up with it as part of our home. But at some point in my pre-teen years, I returned from school one day to the view of my mother’s body up to her neck protruding from that opening in the wall. Her head was obscured, and her voice muffled.

Despite the fact that I had seen this view on a regular basis, I was suddenly, one particular day, struck with an image of that mini-elevator crashing down on my mother’s head while she chatted innocently with my aunt. Another image that occasionally visited me was of my mother leaning too far into the shaft, perhaps in order to yell more loudly to my aunt, and then losing her balance and falling downward. My heart would stop in my chest as these images presented themselves to my fearful young mind. I would quickly think of something to ask my mother then, to get her to pull her head back into the apartment. She did not flee war torn Europe, I reasoned, to find safety in the United States and then be endangered this way, in her own home!

     Of course, my sister and I had been trained to stay away from that doorway in the wall, but the only way we could have opened the latch when we were very young would be by standing on a chair, and neither of us had any inclination to bother. Besides, it was for garbage disposal – not a chore we aspired to assume.

     How can anyone describe what a dumbwaiter is? It is a mini-freight elevator. When first invented, the dumbwaiter was operated manually, by a rope on a pulley. Sometimes referred to as a “hoist” or “micro-lift,” it was used in wealthy American homes in the mid 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The word “dumb” refers to a mute; thus, the word “dumbwaiter” represents an object that does the work of a human waiter but does not speak.

      Actually, the first objects that were called dumbwaiters were not these small freight elevators at all. They were what we would call serving trays or lazy Susans today. In addition, an 18^th century British piece of furniture called a dumbwaiter was a small stand with shelves for food placed in dining rooms. These stands, like the serving tray and the lazy Susan on the dining room table, substituted for a waiter doing the serving. At the time, the wealthy had begun employing fewer servants in order to appear to be part of the new bourgeoisie. These“dumbwaiters” helped that trend.

     Today, dumbwaiters – on the order of the one in my childhood apartment – are still found in some kitchen areas of restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and other commercial environments, such as large libraries, where they are used to move heavy books.  They enable the transfer of dishes, food, laundry, and other items in a manner that saves workers from running up and down steps while carrying heavy loads, saving time as well, and saving guests from seeing the workers engaged in these activities.  These dumbwaiters are out of sight, neither seen nor heard.

     Actually, there were times when they were heard. Early manual dumbwaiters often made loud noises when they ran. There were no shock absorbers then on the cart, so when the cart hit the top of the shaft, it produced a loud clang. Running the dumbwaiter too fast and letting it down with a sudden fall would also result in a loud noise. As a child, hearing any noise from the dumbwaiter caused me to imagine someone being struck and injured or killed. For some reason, memory of these fears stayed with me.

     The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of the term “dumbwaiter” in the English language to 1749, when it referred to the piece of dining room furniture described above, although there is a record of its usage from 1745. Its American usage dates to 1847, when a system of pulleys and weights was devised to transport food from a kitchen to floors above in a building.

The principle behind the dumbwaiter, however, is actually much older than that. There is evidence that the ancient Egyptians developed a mechanism that utilized pulleys and weights to lift objects. Centuries later, in 1744, King Louis XV had a personal lift secretly constructed in Versailles to connect his royal bedchamber to the apartment of his favorite duchess. History confirmed what I saw growing up: the dumbwaiter could have personal as well as practical purposes.

      The perfection of the dumbwaiter was a gradual process. In 1853, Elisha Otis (of Otis Elevator fame) invented the first useable passenger elevator, which featured a safety mechanism. The passenger elevator became a sort of model for the dumbwaiter.  In the 1870s, Charles H. Gurles improved the mechanism. The invention of the mechanical dumbwaiter is credited to a New Yorker, George W. Cannon, in 1887. It utilized a brake system invented in 1883. In the 1920s, the electric motor, in most cases, replaced the manually operated dumbwaiter. (This modern improvement apparently bypassed my old Brooklyn apartment building.)

     The term and concept of the dumbwaiter gained popular renown in 1960, when the play The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter premiered. A dumbwaiter plays a major role in the play and serves two purposes. It delivers food to two men waiting in a basement, and, via a speaking tube, delivers orders to them from an unseen boss. In this particular story, the word “dumb” takes on another meaning, as the order from above involves instructing one of the men to kill the other.

Perhaps Pinter’s play popularized the notion of a dumbwaiter as a useful invention. It certainly introduced the concept of using a dumbwaiter for communication purposes, something my mother and aunt already knew.

When I grew up, married, and moved to another apartment building – this one in Flatbush, a different section of Brooklyn –  lo and behold! No dumbwaiter! Instead, there was a garbage room on each floor, which featured a small pull-out shelf in the wall, into which tenants were supposed to deposit their garbage, in sealed bags. How advanced that seemed! Although there was a vague similarity to a dumbwaiter, since the garbage did go into an opening in a wall, it was too small to provoke any frightening scenarios in my mind.  Decapitation by dumbwaiter was off the list of things to fear!

 The superintendent of the building was constantly hanging signs warning that we must not throw loose garbage into the garbage slot as that will invite roaches. There was no way then to catch the inconsiderate slob or slobs doing this. (Video cameras, I believe, had yet to be invented.)

During the years I lived in that building amid the super’s barrage of warning signs, I could not help but admit that there was one advantage to the old dumbwaiter for garbage collection, aside from the fact that the tenants did not have to leave their apartments. The dumbwaiter fostered a sense of responsibility and community in the tenants, since it was required that the garbage be placed in tied bags. If anyone would have tried to throw loose garbage into the dumbwaiter cart, everyone else – tenants and the super – would immediately notice and the guilty party was sure to be loudly reprimanded. As far as I know, this never occurred.

     At least I no longer had to deal with the fear of leaning too far in to a dark and scary dumbwaiter shaft. Now all I had to fear was getting locked in that smelly garbage room, and possibly encountering roaches! An important lesson was learned: there will always be something to fear.

          Recently, taking stock of my past, I’ve come to think of dumbwaiter-speak, as practiced by my mother and her sister-in-law so many years ago, as the development of an art form. Conversing via dumbwaiter required focus, as one could not do other things while leaning into the shaft. In that sense, it was closer to face to face conversation than to cellphone or text. It also allowed the two parties to refrain from actually breaching the physical distance between home turfs. It gave them the means to communicate and build their bond, yet without feeling they were compromising their time, since actually visiting each other would have been considered selfish and trivial then. Their closeness through the years was most definitely reinforced by their use of this invention, and I often think they should be credited with having discovered a secondary function for it.

Now, I think of the dumbwaiter as quaint – almost cute.  My mother’s and aunt’s use of the dumbwaiter is emblematic of a time and place in our immigrant lifestyle. Taking something at hand, something simple, and making it functional and useful, without abandoning the roles they embraced – what a wonderful example. The camaraderie of the old shtetls of Europe could be transferred to the New World!

        Yet I cannot believe I am the only child of the dumbwaiter era to have found the entire concept frightening. I’ve imagined that a dumbwaiter could be employed in a horror movie, where someone opens a dumbwaiter, garbage in hand, and a scary villain jumps out and attacks. If there is such a movie, I’ve never seen it.

Along with black and white television and bulky shoulder pads, the dumbwaiter belongs in the annals of American history. I propose we recognize the virtues of this device in order to appreciate how our mothers utilized their environment for good purposes.  Something designed for disposal of smelly garbage transformed into a vehicle for building rapport and communication – what could be more inspiring than that?