My mom claims that when she was a girl, the apartment she and her parents lived in had a dumbwaiter and an incinerator in the basement which you could throw trash down into through a chute in the side of the wall. This would have been in the early 1960s in Bayside, NY.
I have never actually seen either a dumbwaiter or an incinerator chute in any building in my entire life. Do they still make these in modern buildings or are they entirely a thing of the past?
I lived in a pretty new high rise in North Miami Beach in the 90’s that had a trash chute. I would assume they are very common in apartments of adequate height. What better way to centralize trash collection? No clue about the incinerator aspect of 'em.
For dumbwaiters, a quick Google search says, yes, there are still people making dumbwaiters. (I have personally seen one in a library.) I couldn’t find one for an incinerator chute in particular, although there are certainly trash chutes installed in modern buildings. How else would you expect residents in high rise apartment buildings to dump their garbage?
Our condo (built in the 90’s) has a trash chute in the laundry room. In fact, I just threw some trash down it. No incinerator at the bottom though, just a dumpster. Given current pollution laws I can’t imagine incinerators being legal in any major city these days.
I know of an apartment building in Pennsylvania Ave. in DC, probably built in the 80s, that has trash chutes in every floor but they are not used, probably because of smell or something, so they just have garbage cans in each floor’s chute room. They also have separate cans for recyclables.
There are plenty of buildings in New York City that have trash chutes.
In the older buildings, these were originally incinerator chutes (i.e., the trash would be dropped down the chute, and then burned in the incinerator in the basement), but now incinerators are an environmental no-no, so they trash just goes into a compactor and is taken away by the Sanitation department.
Here in St. Louis I used to live in a high rise built in ~1965. It had a trash chute which ended in a compactor which drained into a dumpster. They recommended folks bag their trash securely to reduce stink. We used it most days, as did everybody else.
And, as noted above, they added recycling bins in each floor’s chute vestibule.
Which is also where you left out-sized items for the staff to deal with. The chute’s cross-section was barely 12", so a typical kitchen trash can 13 gallon garbage bag was too big; most folks re-used grocery store bags; when they were full, they were just the right size.
Mr. Neville and I moved into a new apartment building in 2003 that had a trash chute. It went to a dumpster, not an incinerator.
Annoyingly pedantic addition: Incinerators are still legal and occasionally built, but they need enough pollution controls that you can’t fit one in a basement. So it’s possible the garbage going down a chute may be incinerated, after the garbage haulers take it away from the building (and for large buildings, depending on the city, it’s more likely a private hauler than the city sanitation department).
That’s a pity, as dumbwaiters were a fascination to kids. Most of the apartments we lived in as a kid in NYC (several Boroughs) in the '30s had them as well as incinerator chutes.
When I was about 5-6 years old, when my mother was not home, I could squeeze into the dumbwaiter. They had large ropes that you could pull to raise or lower them, so I coulld pull myself down, and back up. Had a ball, and fortunately, my mother never found out. Several of my friends did the same thing.
Back around 1970, we were contemplating building a house in Vermont. It was going to be on the side of a steep hill, with the garage to be on the bottom, and two stories above for living space. I decided to see if I could get a dumbwaiter so we could pull groceries up to the kitchen. No Internet then, but somehow I found a place that still made and installed them. The total cost was well over $10,000, so we passed on that. For other reasons, we neer did build the house.
Dumbwaiters are regulated by building codes, and generally require the same safety precautions as elevators. The general concern for both dumbwaiters and trash chutes is that they can provide a pathway for smoke and fire.
Something I’ve always wondered about those garbage chutes - how are they cleaned? (Or even, are they cleaned?) I imagine with everyone pitching rubbish down them on a regular basis they must get pretty manky and soon start to reek. 
You’re supposed to only put bagged trash down them, or at least you were in our building.
supposed to
LOL
Every building I lived in with a trash shoot you’re supposed to, but somehow it never quite happens does it 
I lived in a highrise with a garbage chute about 10 years ago. As far as I could tell the chute was never cleaned, I’m not even sure how it could have been cleaned. It was indeed extremely manky in there, and opening the chute door let out a pungent waft of garbage rotting odour, especially in the summer.
Also, people occasionally put things in there that were clearly too large to fit (typically pizza boxes). This would result in a blocked chute and a column of backed-up garbage that could reach incredible heights - we lived on the 14th floor, and it wasn’t uncommon to open the chute door and see a wall of debris. THAT smelled even worse.
There are dumbwaiters all over in Europe. Practically any food-serving establishment spanning more than one storey will have one. I’m actually hard-pressed to think of a two-storey pub or restaurant here in London that doesn’t have a dumbwaiter.
Not quite the same, but my 1970s house in Clinton, Iowa had a laundry chute running from the first and second floor bathrooms to the basement. Change out of your clothes; down the chute to a strategicly placed laundry basket in the basement.
How were dumbwaiters used in apartment buildings? I can understand private residences, but I’m not sure how they would be used in multi-household residences.
I lived on the 11th floor of a building in college with a trash chute. One of the problems was the loud noise made when a big trash bag would hit the bottom after falling 15 or 20 floors. If it happened late at night the people on lower floors near the chute might wake up .
Way back when, most apartment buildings had them, at least in NYC. Each apartment had an access door, which had an inside bolt so idiotic kids llike me that rode in them, could not open them from the shaft. The dumbwaiter box was way too small for a burgler to get in. Unless, of course, it was a cat burgler.
To answer the question, when we came back from shopping, we went into the basement, pulled the box down, loaded our groceries, walked up the stairs (no elevators in any place I lived, even six floors up), enterd the apartment and pulled it up. Anybody who has to walk up five or six flights of stairs, was thankful not to have to lug bags of groceries up.
As I noted earlier, they had a rope on a pulley to make it go up or down. I suppose they are now electric like an elevator. Yes? No?