Elevators II
ELEVATORS II
My last Construction Noteleft the story of elevators at the turn of the 20thcentury, when art, science, and literature came together to flex the muscles of the Republic, still recovering from the Civil War and the depressions of the late 1800s. The American century was just beginning and optimism was high.
There is more to tell; but let it wait for now while I bring you up to date about the progress at Capital Crossing. Sidewalks now completely surround 200 Massachusetts Avenue and the traditional D.C. tear drop and double globe street lights have been set along several streets.
Granite curbs line the west side of 2ndStreet and curbs and sidewalks will soon begin to appear on the east side of 2ndStreet in front of Georgetown Law’s McDonough Hall. Street paving will soon begin on 2ndStreet south of the highway tunnel exit. One can now look west at the corner of 2ndand F Streets and begin to visualize the shape of F Street between 2ndand 3rdStreets. Pinched at the east and west corners to provide some traffic calming and indented parking spaces along the north and south curbs will distinguish it from a normal downtown city street. Drivers now encounter fewer obstacles in the traffic lanes on 2ndStreet and Massachusetts Avenue. Unfortunately, the drivers have gotten bolder and less concerned about safety as they speed out of the tunnel and down the streets. Everyone wants to beat the turn of the red-light as they barrel through the intersection, thus showing little concern for pedestrians. So be careful crossing those streets; it is getting dangerous out there.
A great deal of work is occurring in the garage beneath 250 Massachusetts Avenue, but little of it is visible to the passerby. The fire suppression system has been installed and tested. Conduit for car charging stations — a LEED feature of the building — has been installed throughout most of the garage. Mechanical exhaust fans have been tested and are operating, fire alarm installation is on-going, and generators have passed their start up tests.
Excavation continues in south block. Little remains of the original 3rdStreet highway exit wall. Concrete pours continue on the center block garage, curing against the back and side walls of the Holy Rosary Church Campanile. The bell tower now has the stability it had lost during the past few months. Concrete pours on the center block portion of the garage will top-out sometime in November. This will lead to a major milestone in the development of the block. The Historic Adas Israel Synagogue, which has been sitting like a patient orphan by the side of the road, will move to its final home in mid-December.
Inside 200 Massachusetts Avenue, the build-out continues for the first Capitol Crossing tenants. They expect to arrive in January. Punch list items are being addressed, final inspections of the green roof, the fire alarm systems, and the elevators are taking place, and commissioning of the utilities is winding down. Little remains to be done in 200 Massachusetts Avenue. Interior signage has begun to appear and the address of the building now rests proudly above the entrance. For all intents and purposes, that building is complete. The certificate of occupancy is expected around December 20th.
Work continues on the pedestrian bridge between 200 Massachusetts Avenue and its companion building to the west. The south tower of 250 Massachusetts Avenue has now been topped out and reshores have been removed up to the ninth floor. On the floors below, new wall framing and dry wall, plumbing risers, and electrical installations appear daily. Inside the north tower, work on the bathroom fixtures and finishes have reached the tenth floor. Feature walls, stone floors, and light fixtures will soon be set in the lobby. The glass-curtain wall of the north tower has been completed except for the store-front window systems being installed along the 1stfloor perimeter. At the south tower, the glass curtain wall has risen to the sixth floor. We can now get a good view of the connecting section between the two towers as the framing system for the curtain wall has been installed. The connector, though located on 3rdStreet, will be the main entrance to 250 Massachusetts Avenue.
As elevator rails begin to be installed through the sixth floor of the north tower of 250 Massachusetts Avenue, I resume the story of the modern elevator. As I mentioned in the last Construction Note, early elevators were operated manually and were used primarily for moving freight. You can watch a video of an historic hand-operated Otis elevator that was still operable in South Boston in 2014 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZpOiJ6jai8The first successful passenger elevator, installed by Otis in the E.V. Haughwout Building in Manhattan in 1857, was operated by a steam engine. Although steam-powered elevators were used for some time, they were soon replaced by elevators powered by electricity. According to the Siemens Company, Werner von Siemens built the first electric elevator in 1880 for use at the Mannheim Pfalzgau Trade & Agricultural Exhibition in Germany. The electric motor was powered by the dynamo-electric principle. The dynamo, an electrical generator suitable for industrial applications, was invented independently by Werner von Siemens, Sir Charles Wheatstone, and Samuel Alfred Varley in 1866 and 1867. Von Siemens placed the elevator motor beneath the floor of the platform. Passengers rode to the top of a viewing tower in an open cab, unaware of what was sending them skyward, and then traveled back down to earth. A gearing system fitted with racks enabled the platform to move up and down the elevator shaft. More than 8,000 visitors used the electric elevator at the Exhibition.
Von Siemens’ elevator was actually quite crude and could not compete with the steam-driven hydraulic elevators of the era. Von Siemens himself lost interest in the elevator and turned his attention to trains and power systems. The Siemens Company still exists though it is not in the elevator business. Siemens’ competitor Otis on the other hand, bought out most of their contemporary competitors like Haughton, Gurney, Watson, and A.B. See. Today Otis has new competitors including Mitsubishi, Schindler, ThyssenKrupp, Hitachi, and a few others. Most are international corporations with principal offices outside of the United States. Otis remains the foremost U.S. elevator manufacturer.
In 1889, Otis delivered the world’s first electric-powered elevator to the Demarest Building, home to a carriage manufacturing business, located at 33rdStreet and Fifth Avenue in New York. By the turn of the century, Otis Brothers and Company established electricity as the standard for elevator design; but acceptance was not easy. Like the early elevator itself, people feared the new electric technology as much as they were astounded by it. It was an unseen power, capable of making life easier and brighter but just as capable of swiftly extinguishing a life in a painful and grotesque manner. Electricity also permitted buildings to grow taller, with higher stories now reachable by electric elevators. Thus, one might say, it was the electric elevator that created the skyscraper. But fear is often banished slowly. Dangling high above the ground in a building that seemed to defy gravity, while riding in a small elevator cab, that was powered by an unseen and potentially deadly force, seemed to be a trifecta of unnatural risk. To many people, it was a very uncomfortable bet.
Notwithstanding these fears, the future beckoned and electricity led the way. Otis soon created a new company, the Otis Electrical Company, to manufacture the highly specialized motors and controls employed in the elevator. Organized in 1892, it was a joint endeavor between Otis Brothers and Company, Thomson-Houston Electrical Company, Edison General Electric Company, and the General Electric Company. Equally important, Otis developed the first gearless traction electric elevator in 1903. A geared traction elevator has a gearbox that is attached to the motor, which drives the wheel that moves the ropes. Unlike a geared traction elevator, the gearless traction elevator has a wheel that is directly attached to the motor. Although this seems like a small change, the functional differences were immense. Geared traction elevators at the time could attain speeds of up to 500 feet per minute and a maximum travel distance of around 250 feet. Gearless traction elevators were capable of speeds of up to 2,000 feet per minute and had a maximum travel distance of around 2,000 feet.
The gearless traction elevator, along with the development of steel and air conditioning, transformed American cities. As journalist Joseph Kellard wrote, “The elevator’s most significant affect, however, is how it helped transform architecture. Along with the steel girder, the elevator made possible a unique and distinctly American architecture: the skyscraper. The skylines of cities were dramatically redesigned, as stately buildings, soaring ever higher were erected and stood as proud boasts of American ingenuity.” Chicago and New York, graced by some of the most talented architects America has ever known, began, as Daniel Boorstin said in The Creators, “to build tall.” Technology continued to improve, making elevators and tall buildings safer. Otis developed the self-leveling elevator in 1915 providing accurate stops at floor landings. They developed signal controls in 1924, relieving operators of all duties except pushing buttons and closing doors, thus permitting accurate, automatic stops at twice the speed of manual operation. An American inventor, Joseph Giovanni, patented a safety bumper in 1944 that prevented the elevator doors from closing on a passenger. Elevators were no longer dangerous and people no longer felt terrified when embarking on the ride up. Yet, accidents and malfunctions still happen. On Friday, six people were trapped on the eleventh floor of the John Hancock Center in Chicago after two of its cables broke. All they knew was that they were trapped somewhere between the lobby and the ninety-fifth floor. After two hours, firefighters broke through a brick wall to rescue them.
Elevator technology permitted architects to push ever higher. In 1913, merchant Frank Woolworth constructed a 792-foot-tall building bearing his name. It was called the “cathedral of commerce.” Two year later, the Equitable Life Building, with its 39 stories and 1.2 million feet of space, became the world’s largest office building. The Chrysler Building, completed in 1930, stood at 77 stories and featured high-speed elevators. It was the world’s tallest skyscraper for less than a year because the 102-story Empire State Building was built just a few months later. The Empire State Building would remain New York’s tallest building until the early 1970s, when the World Trade Center’s 110-storied twin towers were erected. Similar activity occurred in every major industrial and mercantile city in America, especially in Chicago.
Odd elevators were also developed. Peter Ellis, an architect living in Liverpool, England, invented the Paternoster elevator in 1860. According to Michele Lent Hirsch, writing for the Smithsonian Magazinein 2015, the name is derived from “Latin for ‘our father,’ the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer, and refers to the way the chain of cabinets moves like a rosary in a religious person’s hand.” Another possibility is that passengers say a final prayer before entering this strange lift. As seen below, the elevator has two shafts side by side and has no doors. Inside the shafts are a chain of compartments that move like a Ferris Wheel that never stops. Passengers leap into the box at the right moment and then leap out at their floor. If passengers miss their floor, they stay on until the compartment moves laterally at the top of the shaft into the other shaft. They then wait as the elevator moves downward until they reach their floor, at which time they jump out. If they miss the first floor, they are dispatched into hell after saying their prayers. Just joking; actually they move laterally below the surface of the ground floor into the other shaft to begin their new upward journey. You can watch a Paternoster elevator operate at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoCQ6tq5wJEand at https://global.handelsblatt.com/european-lifestyles/non-stop-paternosters-give-germans-pause-229036
Most Paternosters were used in German department stores, but there were also many operating in other parts of Europe. Most of those in England were shut down in the latter part of the 20thcentury; but as many as seventy were reported to exist in the former Czechoslovakia in 2006, and a few hundred were reported to exist in Germany in 2015. Installation of new Paternosters are now banned in Europe, but you might still be able to ride one on a private tour in Prague.
Another unique elevator, built in the 1940s, is closer to home. The elevator in the George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria ascends at a 7.5-degree angle because the top of the tower is narrower than the bottom. Several elevators were installed in the building. One, designed by Otis, accommodated the slant by installing wheels against the wall. Another was built on the slant to avoid piercing the second floor’s memorial hall. When built, they were the only slanting elevators in the world. A Washington Post Reporter said “you can feel yourself leaning to the side of the elevator as you go up.” It is still there. Go ride it some time.
Despite all of these advances, the one constant was the elevator operator or liftboy as he was called in the Gay Nineties. Even though a mechanism for automatically closing the doors to the elevator shaft was patented by the American inventor Alexander Miles in 1887, Otis continued to design their elevators for manual operation. White-gloved operators, often women provided a personal touch and a hint of elegance to any building. At the grand Chicago emporium Marshall Field’s, the women were expected to polish their skills at charm school before entering the profession. In addition to charm and deference, operators had to develop the skills needed to hand-control a rheostat lever that could dictate the speed and direction of the cab. Providing passengers with a smooth ride up was no easy skill. Operators needed an eye for detail so that the floor and car lined up perfectly when the cab stopped. Failure to do so might cause passengers to stumble or even fall when entering or exiting the elevator.
I am old enough to remember riding with Marshall Field’s rookie elevator operators whose imprecise stops sent passengers abruptly going up and down multiple times, usually for just a few inches, as the operator sought the exact alignment of door and floor. Elevator operators, like doormen, also provided an added level of security and service to a building’s residents. They accepted and delivered packages and dry cleaning for the building’s tenants and screened visitors coming into the building. They also cared for people returning home too drunk to remember their floor or room number, how to use their keys with shaky hands, or manage their own safety. Operators were also expected to keep the tenants’ secrets if secrets needed to be kept. Many adulterous rendezvous were kept secret by well-tipped operators.
There are still some elevator operators around. The Ring Building, built in 1947 south of Dupont Circle, had a manually-operated elevator until at least 2015. Legend says that Gustave Ring, the man who built the building, made a deathbed wish that the building would always have elevator operators. I haven’t visited the property recently so I can’t say if they are still there. Andy Newman, a reporter with the New York Times,contacted New York City Buildings Department in 2017 and learned that more than 500 buildings still had manually-operated elevators. He visited eighty-seven of those buildings and found that more than three-quarters of them now had push-button elevators. In December of 2017, Newman reported that Ramón Rivera still operated his elevator at a building at 47 Plaza Street, overlooking Prospect Park in Brooklyn. He found other manually-operated elevators on the Upper East and West Side, including one at the Hotel des Artistes on West 67thStreet just off Central Park. Newman wrote that “[c]ollectively they form a hidden museum of obsolete technology and anachronistic employment, a network of cabinets of wonder staffed round the clock. No one knows how many there are, exactly, but spot checks indicated that most had gone push-button long ago. On the other hand, officials at Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, to which most doormen and elevator operators belong, said they knew of only one or two.”
By the 1970s, most elevators operated without human attendants. The cost of running a manually-operated elevator can actually exceed that of modern elevators over time. In addition, parts for the old elevators have become harder to find. Handles have to be custom-made and suppliers dwindled as push button elevators gained the ascendancy. One seasoned, but retiring operator commented, “The pistons, they just don’t make them anymore.”
The first step to truly modern elevators came as a result of technical achievements during World War II. Otis developed the “Autotronic Elevatoring System” where the attendant merely registered the floor and initiated the door closing. In 1950, Otis installed a completely self-service elevator in the Atlantic Refining Building in Dallas, Texas, casting the fate of the liftboy to that of the old lamplighter, a romantic remnant of an era with more human interaction.
Elevators of the past, marvels that they were, were quite simple in some ways. As Jesse Dunietz, writing for Popular Mechanicswrote, “[t]he earliest electric elevators were controlled by the whims of their human operators. An attendant standing inside would drive the lift up and down with a throttle of sorts, stopping wherever he or a dispatcher saw a waiting passenger.” Today we assume that elevators operate simply by pushing a button. Again, Dunietz reminds us that “[a] lot happens when you push that button: The elevator system must decide which car to send for you, and when. It must decide whether to go up from the fifth floor to collect those people on the 7th before coming down to the lobby to answer your call. It must consider who’s been waiting longer, and which of the many paths is the most efficient and least painful for everybody. Elevator traffic is an elaborate, delicate dance, and once you see the steps, you can’t help but tip your hat to the engineers who choreograph it all.” The technology and algorithms of elevator control are far too complex to discuss here. If you are interested you can read more at https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a20986/the-hidden-science-of-elevators/
Suffice it to say that the elevators in Capital Crossing are state of the art. The buildings are equipped with “machine room less” (MRL) elevators, now the standard type of elevator used in medium-rise buildings. MRLs were invented in the 1950s by Pickerings Lifts, a British elevator manufacturer based in Stockton-On-Tees in the Northeast of England. Pickerings discontinued its product in the 1970s but other elevator companies helped to refine the MRL. In 1996, Kone launched the world’s first MRL elevator system, the “Kone MonoSpace,” along with its signature hoisting machine called the EcoDisc. Otis, the manufacturer of the Capital Crossing elevators, developed their first MRL elevator system in 2000. The Gen 2 model, used in this project, uses flat, polyurethane coated steel belts instead of conventional steel ropes. Since 2015, MRLs have become the pinnacle of elevator drive technology, making other traction-based machines obsolete.
There are several advantages to the MRL elevator. As the name implies, the MRL elevator eliminates the bulky machine room of the traction elevator by locating the hoist motor in machinery space above the elevator hoistway and placing a small control cabinet near it in a control room. Counterweights are located to the rear of the cab along the rails. The cassette, now called the integrated machine beam system, provides the structural support for the MRL machine that lifts the car and the counterweights. The polyurethane coated steel belts mentioned above allow for a smaller machine sheave, reducing machine size by 80 percent and raising efficiency up to 50 percent. The belts have small wires embedded in them to create an electrical circuit that monitors belt integrity. Should one of the wires be severed, the elevator shuts down to preserve the integrity of the belt and provide safety for the passenger. The control space, located on the top floor of the buildings, can be as simple as a small closet. Thus it also occupies less space providing more space to generate revenue from the building. The motors are more efficient than traditional traction elevators. Motors require about twenty-five horsepower as opposed to the forty horsepower needed to power older elevators. Thus they contribute to the LEED score for green buildings. Despite the reduced horsepower, they can move between 200 feet per minute to 500 feet per minute. Elevators at Capitol Crossing will operate at 350 per minute. That speed was chosen by the design team after an analysis of what would best serve the building.
Although many elevators still use up/down push-button technology for calling elevators and selecting floors, all of the groups of passenger elevators at Capitol Crossing utilize the more sophisticated Destination Dispatching (DD) system. These elevators load passengers according to their destination. In a DD elevator, passengers select their floor destination using a touch screen located next to the elevator that displays the floor selected. Once it is entered, the system automatically designates an assigned elevator cab and directs the passenger to it. When the car arrives, it will display all of the floors at which it will stop. The algorithm employed by the system monitors demand, assesses real-time origin and destination data to reduce delays, saves energy by maximizing efficiency, and can even account for the walking distance to the car to ensure that the car doesn’t leave before the passenger gets to it. For construction geeks like me, the complexity of these elevators is a wonder — they are truly magical. You can read more about them at https://continuingeducation.bnpmedia.com/courses/otis-elevator-company/destination-dispatch-elevator-systems-benefit-passengers-building-owners-and-design-professionals/1/
Some historians believe that elevators transformed society as profoundly as the automobile or the electric light bulb. They certainly changed the nature of the city. Without elevators, cities would have no tall buildings and without tall buildings, cities would have grown across vast swaths of the planet. Imagine the population of the world’s five largest cities, Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, and Mexico City — cities with populations of between 21 and 37 million people — all living at ground level. The cities would stretch out for miles, further devastating the planet.
Like concrete, another underappreciated essential of modern life, there are few poems or songs about elevators. But this lyric description, written by Library of Congress Research Specialist Susan Garfinkel as she reflected upon the place of elevators in motion pictures, captures the magic that we experience daily but seldom contemplate and hardly even appreciate anymore.
Elevators, and the networks of shafts and vents that house them, are to our buildings like veins and arteries to the body–conduits that permeate and structure the spaces of our lives, while remaining separate from the fixity of happenings around them. Nearby yet hidden from view, always in motion, temporary shelter to an ever changing cast of characters, guided as if by some invisible force, elevators have become an unaccustomed part of our everyday existence. If they are sometimes mechanically unsound, arrive and depart too quickly, bear surprising visitors, or force strangers into too-close proximity, this only enhances the dizzying quality they so easily invoke in fictional presentations. The tightness of the car is by turns inviting and confining, a comfortable enclosure or a space of anxiety and discomfort, while its mundane interior affords the camera a variety of challenging visual perspectives. If its doors open us to the secrets of interior space, they also make us unsuspecting voyeurs when we look in or stare out. The shaftways, vents, and mechanisms that surround the cars are dark and deserted as tombs, or sparkling playgrounds for the eye.
Best wishes for a happy Thanksgiving.
Wally Mlyniec
SOURCES
Richard Shaffer, President of Atlantic Consulting Inc., contributed to the Noteand helped me understand the workings of the MRL elevator.
Janelle Sampana, L’20, also contributed to this Note.
Katherine Bindley, The 22-Year Ride, New York Times, Feb. 27, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/nyregion/thecity/01elev.html
Daniel Boorstin, The Creators, A History of Heroes of the Imagination, Vintage Books, 1992
Jesse Dunietz, The Hidden Science of Elevators, Popular Mechanics, May 24, 2016, https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a20986/the-hidden-science-of-elevators/
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