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.
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