I live in an apartment building that was clearly built prior to WW2, though I have no idea how long before. There is still a genuine icebox in my kitchen (though I obviously don’t use it for its original purpose).
My modern refrigerator sits in a corner, in what I figured out a long time ago was originally a “breakfast nook”. To one side of the refrigerator are some built-in shelves, which are blocked by the refrigerator.
Anyway, as part of hunting down a mouse problem (first mice I’ve had in 14 years in this apartment), I pulled the refrigerator out of its little cubby hole to clean out behind it and look for evidence of mice. In the wall behind, I found this:
The whole thing is about three feet high and one foot wide. I couldn’t find any indication that this thing opens up. Nor could I get adequate light through the slots at the bottom to get a very good view of what’s in there. What I could see was a bit of old wiring connected to a flat object that is screwed to the back wall of the small compartment. The flat object appears to be about six inches long, maybe 1-1/4-inch wide, and 1/4-inch thick. It looks like it’s made of some early form of plastic (bakelite?).
The wall itself is the rear outside wall of my apartment. The outside of the building has been redone more than once, so any corresponding fixtures/wires on the outside are long gone or covered up.
My first thought was that the gadget inside had had something to do with the doorbell; I had a nonfunctional doorbell button next to my front door, up until the most recent exterior remodel, but I’ve never found any other evidence of the actual bell anywhere in the apartment. But then I thought, why would it be in the kitchen?
So maybe the unit here was a shelf for an old-fashioned telephone? With the ringer hidden below?
The only thing that makes me question the phone idea is that there no holes for the wire to the phone itself.
Unless the little thing in the lower right corner was some sort of connector. It’s clearly been painted over many times, but it just looks like a little metal hook.
But yeah, that’s 100% an old phone nook for a landline phone. The bit I quote is was almost certainly describing the connector to the phone that isn’t there now.
Some old phones had the ringer inside a box behind those slots. The box and those slots basically made a speaker-cabinet of sorts that amplified the sound of the ringer.
The example here (from the Sears Roebuck and Co. catalopg) is a bit more obvious:
The house I grew up in (through grade school) had a phone with a separate ringer box mounted near the floor. The phone itself looked like any other phone of the time and was hardwired (i.e, no plug and jack) to the ringer box. In those days you leased the phone from Ma Bell and don’t you dare mess with it once it’s installed.
House was built around 1960, so current tech for the time.
I notice yours doesn’t have the curved extension on the front, to give more space for the phone. It may be as simple as that yours was neatly cut off and the raw wood painted over. I was thinking that the niche didn’t seem deep enough for a lot of phones. Looking up images of phones from the 1940’s, some of them have small oval or square-ish bases, but most seem to have the oblong boxy shapes that I remember from the 50’s. Or it could have been intended for a wall phone?
The text in the Sears Roebuck catalog states that its telephone cabinet shelf was 8" deep. So yes, I’d be inclined to believe the projecting few inches of the shelf was removed at some point to prevent it from interfering with the refrigerator that eventually got put in front of it.
And when the phone was replaced with a more modern phone with the ringer inside the base, many of those phone nooks were modified to make that underneath space into a storage location for the phone book. Often the part with the slots got hinges at the bottom, it opened out & down and the phone book was inside (and often notepads & pencils).
That’s what I was wondering, as it seems quite deep (length-wise).
I’m fascinated by this design feature, which feels unique to the US to me – homes embracing the latest technology. It’s a bit like the phones on super long cords you see in TV/films from the 50s-80s - another thing you don’t see outside the US.
Growing up in the UK, the phone was always on a special console table in the hallway, often with a seat next to it. I guess our kitchens weren’t big enough!
