18th August 1941
St.Moritz Hotel
Hotel stationery for the 'St.Moritz on-the-park', New York. Sent to an address in Berlin. Featuring various censors. With return address at the Hotel Bolivar. Note the 'Dead Letter Office' announcement printed on the envelope flap. Ref: 18.08.1941
St.Moritz on-the-park
The Hotel St. Moritz was built on the site of the old New York Athletic Club. The hotel was designed and built in 1930 by the Hungarian-born architect Emery Roth, and constructed by the Harper Organization, representing Harris Uris and Percy Uris. The estimated cost was about $6 million.
In 1932, the Bowery Savings Bank took over the hotel and then sold it to the Engadine Corporation, led by the Greek-American hotel magnate S. Gregory Taylor (1888–1948). In 1950, the hotel was completely redecorated and redesigned, and, from the following year on, it housed the Café de la Paix, said to be the first sidewalk restaurant in New York City.
Source: Wikipedia
Link to interesting blog that is set in the Hotel Bolivar
Dead Letter Office
A dead letter office (DLO) is a facility within a postal system where undeliverable mail is processed. Mail is considered to be undeliverable when the address is invalid so it cannot be delivered to the addressee, and there is no return address so it cannot be returned to the sender.
At a DLO, mail is usually opened to try to find an address to forward to. If an address is found, the envelope is usually sealed using tape or postal seals, or enclosed in plastic bags and delivered. If the letter or parcel is still undeliverable, valuable items are then auctioned off while the correspondence is usually destroyed. Despite this practice, in the past some undeliverable envelopes were acquired by philatelists.
Dead letter offices go by different names in different countries. In many English-speaking countries they are called returned letter offices.
The U.S. Post Office, as it was known then, started a dead letter office in 1825 to deal with undeliverable mail. By 1893, it handled about 20,000 items every day.
In 2006, approximately 90 million undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) items ended up in the dead-letter office of the U.S. Postal Service; when the rightful owners cannot be identified, the correspondence is destroyed to protect customer privacy, and enclosed items of value are removed.
Source: Wikipedia
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