How the elevator transformed America

[petronius]

When Daniel Levinson Wilk steps onto the elevator at work, he doesn’t just stand there and zone out. Instead he focuses on what’s happening to him: the strange push against his feet, the sense of moving through a dark and hollow artery in the middle of his building. Over the next 90 seconds, Wilk absorbs—or tries to—the sense that he’s having an experience that profoundly changed America.

The elevator, Wilk says, is responsible for shaping modern life in ways that most people simply don’t appreciate. An associate professor of history at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and a board member of the Elevator Museum in Queens, Wilk would like everyone to be more conscious of the elevators in their lives. But he is particularly disappointed with his fellow academics—people who are supposed to be studying how the world works—for failing to consider just how much elevators matter.

“The lack of interest scholars have shown in the cultural life of elevators,” he wrote in a recent e-mail, “is appalling.”

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. In fact, according to 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.

--- Snip ---

http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/03/02/how-elevator-transformed-america/b8u17Vx897wUQ8zWMTSvYO/story.html

Elevators deserve a lot more serious consideration that I realized...

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. They rise to the occasion.

But this is a thought-provoking idea. What is funny to me is how Doug Adams nibbled around this issue with humor and disdain.

[valerief]

2. Do elevators still have elevator music? nt

[ret5hd]

3. Yeah, but the elevators just call it music.

[undeterred]

4. What about the escalator?

[valerief]

5. It's kind of a car-elevator combo, isn't it? nt