Mail chutes were cutting-edge communications technology when the city's first was installed in the St. James Building at 1133 Broadway in 1898. They have saved New Yorkers countless trips to the lobby or corner mailbox by enabling them to drop letters from their office or apartment floor down a slender glass-and-metal shaft leading to a mailbox, where postal workers retrieve them.

The city had at least 900 active chutes as recently as 20 years ago, but the U.S. Postal Service doesn't keep count anymore. Some have been sealed shut, including those in Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building and the Waldorf-Astoria. But plenty remain in use, including in the St. James Building and the Empire State Building, where chutes stretch from the 86th floor to the lobby. In some cases the anachronisms are being transformed into amenities as apartment buyers come to value their artistic qualities and connection to another time.

"Back in the day, chutes and an Otis elevator were signs of progressive building construction," said Karen Greene, a Manhattan psychologist and the author of the 2015 book Art Deco Mailboxes: An Illustrated Design History. "They meant the building was a good place to rent and run your business. In fancy hotels, guests didn't need to tip bellboys in order to mail their letters or postcards."

But clogs always have been a problem. Long ago they were usually fixed quickly because mail was so important and delivered as many as 12 times a day in some cities before World War II. When the Postal Service cut back to one daily delivery in 1950, "the populace was not happy about it," said Nancy Pope, a curator at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum.

The mother of all mail-chute jams occurred in 1986 between the lobby and the basement of the McGraw-Hill Building at 330 W. 42nd St. Workers removed cinder blocks to rescue 40,000 pieces of mail, filling 23 postal sacks.

Around the same time, accountant and tax lawyer Alan Straus swore off chutes after mail backed up to the seventh floor near his office at 1633 Broadway.

"My mail," he said, "has simply got to arrive to its destination."

Mail chutes were invented in 1883 by Rochester architect James Goold Cutler, whose Cutler Manufacturing Corp. had a monopoly until 1904, when the U.S. Post Office Department opened the business to competitors. One, New York–based American Mailing Device Corp., marketed clog-free chutes, but Cutler Manufacturing's remained so dominant that rivals accused it of anti-competitive practices.

"Every architect and builder in the country has rebelled for years against the prices they have been forced to pay for mail chutes to the Cutler Co.," a competitor fumed at a 1911 congressional hearing. "But they have been helpless, as they have neither the time to make nor hope of success in any fight against Cutler."

Despite controlling the chute market, Cutler remained innovative. A 1948 catalog promoted a new contraption called a cigarette-ejecting mailing pocket. "A cigarette dropped in the mailing opening falls to the floor, where it can do harm," the firm said.

The rise of company mail rooms helped push chutes into irrelevancy, and in 1997 the National Fire Protection Association banned the installation of new ones because they can act as chimneys. Three years later Cutler was acquired by mailbox-maker Florence Corp., which in turn was acquired by Gibraltar Industries of Buffalo in 2007. Meanwhile, email and texting took over: The Postal Service says first-class mail volume has declined by 45% since peaking in 2001. Landlords across the city ripped out chutes or repurposed them. The Woolworth Building's are believed to house internet cables. (Witkoff Group, which owns the part of the building that still has chutes, declined to comment.)

But in certain quarters, appreciation for these relics has rebounded. When the New York Telephone Co. building at 100 Barclay St. was converted to apartments in 2015, the chutes were preserved not only in the landmarked art deco lobby but also on the 10 lower floors still occupied by Verizon. The chutes were kept to honor a time when communication was less than instant, said Jordan Rogove, co-founder of architecture firm DXA Studio, which worked on the building.

"There's something entirely cyclical about our culture," Rogove said. "Old ways of making coffee or furniture are coming back, and chutes are a reminder of the importance society once put on letter writing."

Many chutes lead to handsome brass or bronze mailboxes decorated with stylized eagles, some of them hand-hammered, which are the cultural descendants of cathedral gargoyles. These works of industrial craftsmanship now help sell luxury apartments, such as one that takes up the entire 26th floor of the Carlyle Hotel and comes with a private, active chute. The key selling point for the apartment, whose last owner was Paramount Pictures CEO Brad Grey and which has an asking price of $12.5 million, is probably the 360-degree views. But the chute nicely complements the art deco elevator.

"It's almost a fairy tale," said Noble Black, the Douglas Elliman broker who is marketing the pad. "In a building like this, there is something to having the mail chute."

Unless it's clogged, that is.