Curb box
vertical cast iron sleeve housing the shut-off valve for a property's water service line
A curb box (also known as a valve box, buffalo box, b-box, or in British English stopcock chamber) is a vertical cast iron sleeve, accessible from the public way, housing the shut-off valve (curb cock or curb stop) for a property's water service line. It is typically located between a building and the district's water main lines and usually consists of a metal tube with a removable or sliding lid, allowing access to the turn-key within. It typically serves as the point denoting the separation of utility-maintained and privately maintained water facilities.
The name buffalo box, the first word often capitalized, is applied to curb boxes because they originated in Buffalo, New York.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Curb box” is vertical cast iron sleeve housing the shut-off valve for a property's water service line. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Curb, vertical and cast, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q25041770. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Curb box” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.