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posted by LaminatorX on Saturday December 27 2014, @07:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the vertical-integration dept.

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. But according to Daniel Wilk the automobile and the elevator have been locked in a “secret war” for over a century, with cars making it possible for people to spread horizontally, encouraging sprawl and suburbia, and elevators pushing them toward life in dense clusters of towering vertical columns.

Elevators first arrived in America during the 1860s, in the lobbies of luxurious hotels, where they served as a plush conveyance that saved the well-heeled traveler the annoyance of climbing stairs. It wasn’t until the 1870s, when elevators showed up in office buildings, that the technology really started to leave a mark on urban culture. Business owners stymied by the lack of available space could look up and see room for growth where there was previously nothing but air—a development that was particularly welcome in New York, where a real estate crunch in Manhattan’s business district had, for a time, forced city leaders to consider moving the entire financial sector uptown. Advances in elevator technology combined with new steel frame construction methods to push the height limits of buildings higher and higher. In the 1890s, the tallest building in the world was the 20-story Masonic Temple in Chicago. By 1913, when hydraulic elevators had been replaced with much speedier and more efficient electrical ones, it was the 55-story Woolworth Building in New York, still one of the one-hundred tallest buildings in the United States as well as one of the twenty tallest buildings in New York City. "If we didn't have elevators," says Patrick Carrajat, the founder of the Elevator Museum in New York, "we would have a megalopolis, one continuous city, stretching from Philadelphia to Boston, because everything would be five or six stories tall."

But the elevator did more than make New York the city of skyscrapers, it changed the way we live. “The elevator played a role in the profound reorganization of the building,” writes Andreas Bernard. That means a shift from single-family houses and businesses to apartments and office buildings. “Suddenly … it was possible to encounter strangers almost anywhere.” The elevator, in other words, made us more social — even if that social interaction often involved muttered small talk and staring at doors. Elevators also reinforced a social hierarchy; for while we rode the same elevators, those who rode higher lived above the fray. "It put the “Upper” into the East Side. It prevented Fifth Avenue from becoming Wall Street," writes Stephen Lynch. "It made “penthouse” the most important word in real estate."

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 28 2014, @03:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 28 2014, @03:57AM (#129635)

    They fight these fires [from] the inside

    ...and die by the hundreds.
    ...as do the folks on the upper floors.
    (Yeah, extreme edge case.)

    The best laws ever passed were the ones mandating fire sprinklers.
    ...but those can't deal with thousands of gallons of jet fuel igniting tons of plastic furnishings and hundreds of mountains of paper records.

    -- gewg_

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday December 28 2014, @07:14PM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday December 28 2014, @07:14PM (#129755) Journal

    ...and die by the hundreds.
    ...as do the folks on the upper floors.

    Apparently you didn't bother to read the page I posted, showing the number of sky scraper fire deaths are minuscule.
    If fact, remove 9/11, and you've removed 90% of all skyscraper fire deaths.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 28 2014, @10:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 28 2014, @10:29PM (#129799)

      the page I posted

      ...which lists in the Deaths column the number 2 for the 9/11 events.
      Not a great deal of veracity there. 8-(

      ...and I did note that 9/11 is an edge case.

      When I think of "skyscraper fire", I think of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors; people jumping to their deaths rather than being burned alive.
      The factory owners got away without a scratch and received no punishment for numerous code violations.
      That event changed a lot of things for Working Class people.

      I was angered (but not surprised) that Lamestream Media didn't make a big deal of the centennial of that.

      -- gewg_

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday December 29 2014, @03:20AM

        by frojack (1554) on Monday December 29 2014, @03:20AM (#129855) Journal

        ...which lists in the Deaths column the number 2 for the 9/11 events.
        Not a great deal of veracity there. 8-(

        Reading comprehension 101, gewg_. Every building is listed separately.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.