Paper : Reading...Gunpowder : War..._____ : City

From the Archives:  originally posted in the spring of 2008.

Nick Paumgarten published another fantastic article in last week's New Yorker, this time about elevators (click here to read).  I've already used a few of his reported facts in a couple of my step-on tours, and as I try to commit more of the article to memory, I should warn those of you coming on tours of mine in the near future, that you will most likely be hearing a great deal about the history, the technology, and the future of the vertical transportation industry.

Paumgarten tells the story of Nicholas White who in 1999 was trapped alone in an express elevator of the McGraw-Hill Building at Rockefeller Center from 11pm Friday night until 4pm Sunday afternoon.  There's a time-lapse security video posted on YouTube--forty-one hours of his ordeal compressed into three minutes.  I still haven't been able to watch all the way through.  Although I don't have an elevator phobia, this video makes me very nervous.  Maybe it's the music. 

Here's an excellent excerpt from the Paumgarten article:

"The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war.  Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment.  The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete."

Bravo!  And underrated indeed.  Whenever I ask my groups to name the two most important things needed for a skyscraper (answers:  steel frame and elevator), "the crane" is almost always offered first.  Frequently "elevator" isn't even mentioned until I give the big hint:  "You can't rent out the ninetieth floor of your building unless you have aNNNN __________."

Some interesting facts from the Paumgarten article:

--There are 58,000 elevators in New York City and these make eleven billion trips per year (thirty million per day).

--The world's tallest building, the Taipei 101 Tower, has the world's fastest elevators--fifty-five feet per second.  "The cars are pressurized, to prevent ear damage."

--The first express/local elevator system was designed for the World Trade Center in the 1970's with the introduction of sky lobbies.

--The Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square used to have the worst wait times in New York.

(LITTLE BYTES TANGENT:  I can attest to this.  People with tickets to 8:00 performances at theaters less than one block away could miss the curtain if they didn't leave their rooms by 7:30.)

This was because the hotel was designed with the lobby on the eighth floor, which required the elevators to do extra work.

(LITTLE BYTES TANGENT:  The reason the lobby was placed on the eighth floor was because the developer wanted to keep the riff-raff of Times Square out of his hotel, even though this lobby and hotel were sold as a continuation of the public space of the square.)

To reduce the elevator wait times, the Marriott Marquis installed a "destination dispatch" system, the first in the U.S. to do so.  You now press the number for your desired floor on a central console and are then directed to the elevator which will take you there.  There are no buttons inside the elevators--with fewer stops, you are taken more quickly to your floor.  Other buildings in New York with this system include "the headquarters of the Times, of Hearst, and of the News Corporation."

--The new 7 World Trade Center is home to the "most advanced system going...their destination-dispatch system is integrated with the security system; it reads your I.D. card at a turnstile (registers the floor where you work) and assigns you to an elevator."

--"With destination dispatch, the wait in the lobby may be longer, but the trip is shorter.  And the waiting may not grate as much, because you know which car is yours.  In Japan, the light over your prospective elevator lights up...even if the elevator isn't there yet, to account for what the Japanese call 'psychological waiting time.'  It's like a nod of acknowledgment from a busy bartender."

--"In the old system--board elevator, press button--you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they're driving the conveyance.  In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn't work.  It is there mainly to make you think it works."

I have to stop myself.  Here's the link again to the article:  READ THIS! 

Comments

[Elizabeth]

I had HEARD about this. I always wondered how he peed and pooped. I can't help it. The tape shows no evidence of any of that. Did they cut it out or was he just miraculous?

When I first came to New York I was staying with a friend. He was a room service waiter at the Marriott Marquis. He came home one day white as a sheet. I knew immediately something truly awful was wrong. He had been going up in one of the glass elevators to deliver a tray as a man passed by, falling to his death in the lobby. Apparently The Marquis' atrium is attractive to those who feel they have nothing to live for. They have an agreement with the press to keep the "jumper" news quiet. To make matters worse, it usually isn't a clean fall. The tiered balconies mean people bounce on the way down and body parts end up on several different floors. My friend said the final impact was a loud as a train wreck. This is obviously, some of the worst New York has to offer. I can't go in there without thinking about that.