Today we’re celebrating not leaving the building for basic necessities! It’s too cold out there. In 1953, automats had been thriving throughout New York City for decades, but Rowe Corporation endeavored to explore territory beyond the cafeteria: the apartment lobby. The Clinton Hill Apartments became the testing site for the charmingly retro-futuristic “mechanical milkman,” which claimed to save women from “braving Winter winds” by supplying “refrigerated quart containers of milk right in their apartment lobbies” for 22 cents. According to a February 6, 1953, Brooklyn Daily Eagle article, “the jury of housewives found [the machines] so satisfactory that Rowe manufacturers [were] ready to distribute the machines throughout the city.”
Learn more about the mechanical milkman and other ways Brooklyn tried revolutionizing the 1950s homemaker's workload in this From the Vault post, “Making life easier for the Brooklyn housewife (and househusband),” originally published in 2009.
Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at [email protected].
When my family moved into
During the 1960s, I remember
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