A questioner asked this:
A doorbell-looking wall feature in a second floor bedroom of a 100 year old house. What is this?

Here are some of the people’s answers:
1.Is it a servant’s buzzer? If the house is old enough (or the family that lived there was wealthy enough) it could have been a buzzer to call for the house help/maid/butler/etc. I can’t say for certain that this is right, but I have seen a couple of these in the past and that’s what they were.

2. I had one of these in my old house in the kitchen which was on the second floor. It would unlock the front door so you could let someone in without having to go down stairs. It would reset, the door would re-lock as soon as it was shut. I had a new door put on in the 80’s and it never worked again. It would still buss but wouldn’t unlock the door. They were pretty common in the triple deckers. Hence the expression, I buzz you in. Just my 2 cents.

3. The house I grew up in had an old maid buzzer like this. It wasn’t particularly large either.
4. I saw another post where someone had this in their apartment to buzz people in, but this is a single family home. Witt
5. Was the house ever broken up into apartments? My parents bought a house in the late 70s that had been broken up into apartments and they had to take out a bunch of stuff, multiple bathrooms etc
6. Is it next to a window? Old security bars had a button release like this
7.Ya reckon it’s just a bit like an old fixture?

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In the realm of architectural oddities and historical enigmas, there are few mysteries as intriguing as the doorbell-looking wall feature found in a second-floor bedroom of a 100-year-old house. What purpose could such a peculiar fixture serve? How does it fit into the larger narrative of the house’s history and design? Join us on a journey of exploration and discovery as we delve into the depths of this captivating mystery.
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