Posted on 03/01/2014 7:02:01 AM PST by Borges
For most city-dwellers, the elevator is an unremarkable machine that inspires none of the passion or interest that Americans afford trains, jets, and even bicycles. Wilk is a member of a small group of elevator experts who consider this a travesty. Without the elevator, they point out, there could be no downtown skyscrapers or residential high-rises, and city life as we know it would be impossible. In that sense, they argue, the elevator’s role in American history has been no less profound or transformative than that of the automobile.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonglobe.com ...
A warehouse overstock store I shop at occasionally still had an elevator operator when I went there last year. I have no idea how that old freight elevator to the electronics department on the third floor passed inspection.
Am I the last ‘professional’ elevator operator standing?
***
You triggered a flood of memories for me. In the 1950s, I was a little girl growing up in the suburbs of Baltimore. When my mother wanted to shop in a big store, she rode a bus into Baltimore.
Such an adventure for me. I learned years later that, of her 9 children, I was the one she had the least bit of trouble with on such trips. I remember sitting on the bus mesmerized by the beautiful downtown architecture, some of which is still there.
Riding an elevator was a thrill for me, as there were no elevators in my little suburban world. And I envied the elevator operator. She wore a uniform of some sort — I remember khaki and some brown tones — and she got to push the buttons and announce each floor and what it had to offer.
Sorry. Did not mean to highjack this thread....
Surely the devoted civil servants of WMATA aren’t failing to do robust maintenance on the system?
The last elevator operator I saw was running an elevator at the California State Capitol Building in Sacramento during the Arnold years..
As an architect and builder in the Chicago-area, I am familiar with the Monadnock Building in Chicago, which has both an iron frame and a load-bearing exterior masonry wall (more than six feet at the base).
I worked on an elevator retrofit project in downtown Chicago in the Nineties. There are so many safety features in the system that I felt comfortable sitting on top of each elevator and riding during numerous tests, including sudden stops and stop and go action.
The programming involved in the design of the elevator system is phenomenal. The system can be tweaked to shorten or lengthen stops and recognize other cars in the system and thereby become express cars if a certain number are stopped on a particular floor.
Your post made me smile. Saw it after I posted mine at 22.
My brother, who used to build elevators, says they are the safest mode of mass transportation.
Unless you’re the last in line...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M11Lcn5cXoI
Back in my Kollege Daze, there was an old building built in the 20s that had an original elevator still in operation. It had a wood floor, a hand-operated gate, and smelled of ancient grease and oil. You needed a key to call it, but if you were on the floor where it was, you could ride it. It was like stepping back into another time. Loved it!
Sandra Buie, 72, is all smiles as she greets a rider in her elevator in the 1st Bank Building in South Bend, Ind. First Source Bank, which owns the building, recently said goodbye to Buie and the building's other remaining elevator operator. By all accounts, the two were the last elevator operators still working in the city, and possibly the entire state.
http://www.news-journal.com/news/nation/technology-brings-end-to-elevator-operators-ride/article_3766eff0-3915-56a0-817f-833e27ee9dab.html
Oct 2012 article.
They say that like it would be a bad thing.
Got stuck on an escalator once... what a nightmare. Took hours to get help.
See #31 ... :o)
“Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators. Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft. One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator. (The operator of the other one had stepped out for a cigarette.) By the time the car crashed into the buffer in the pit (a hydraulic truncheon designed to be a cushion of last resort), a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it, serving as a kind of spring. A pillow of air pressure, as the speeding car compressed the air in the shaft, may have helped ease the impact as well. Still, the landing was not soft. The car’s walls buckled, and steel debris tore up through the floor. It was the woman’s good fortune to be cowering in a corner when the car hit. She was severely injured but alive.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=all
My wife and I was actually in an elevator two years ago that had an elevator operator. It was very old and had one of those scissor doors. The control was a sliding lever with "up" and "down". On our way down the operator remarked how while the elevator was very old it was still in great shape. I quipped that I hoped that went for the cables as well.
I think elevators would have a better reputation if they played better music.
what would you expect, a pianist?
A nice string quartet maybe.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.