I had a few apartments that had ice boxes. I don't think they were quite that old. But the apartment buildings had a "trap door?!" in the wall. The ice man could apparently stick a block of ice in the door, or pass it through to the person in the kitchen. In most cases, they had permanently closed these doors for security reasons (Minneapolis, MN has a lot of crime), but it was really neat to see this stuff. In one apartment I still had the ice box which of course was not used for its original purpose any more... I got a kick out of looking at it and imagining just how things worked.