Like, you aren’t necessarily next door neighbors. You’d have to take the streetcar or bus or commuter rail some distance to go meet your friend. You can’t text “sorry the train is 30 minutes late”, because no cell phones, no internet, no tracking buses or trains on your smartphone. No payphones or landlines.
Letters are only for those cross-continental, cross-oceanic relationships. If you live in the same city, then well you’d still have to meet in person cuz it’s not the digital age, no doomscrolling social media and sending texts and memes.
I feel like those were the days where you could have true friendships in society, not “having friends to send memes”.
Depends on where you lived.
In some places, you’d leave a note with someone you knew the recipient was going to see that day. In some places, note passing was quite an artform, including special paper folding to protect the contents from prying eyes.
In Paris, they had the tubes — the entire city was plumbed with vacuum tubes, and you could write a note or even pack a small object into a capsule with an address, drop it in your local receptacle, and it would zip across town in minutes to the recipient address.
In other places, markings on trees, mirrors, flags, smoke signals and various musical instruments and bells have been used.