How elevators transformed NYCs social landscape

It put the Upper into the East Side. It prevented Fifth Avenue from becoming Wall Street. It made penthouse the most important word in real estate.

Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator byAndreas Bernard (New York University Press)

The elevator did more than make New York the city of skyscrapers, it changed the way we live, as German newspaper editor Andreas Bernard explains in Lifted.

The elevator played a role in the profound reorganization of the building, he writes. 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. It also reinforced a social hierarchy; for while we rode the same elevators, those who rode higher lived above the fray. Elisha Graves Otis, who perfected the elevator in Yonkers, helped usher in terraces and corner offices, high-rise apartments and rooftop clubs.

So, what would New York be like without elevators? Besides a lot thinner, Bernard offers three things that changed thanks to Otis innovation.

Before the elevator, buildings in New York basically were limited to six stories because people wouldnt walk any higher. Even when the elevator raised the roof to 12 stories, developers faced a threat greater than technology snobbery.

Upper floors were seen as servants quarters or the attic apartments of the poor. Bernard quotes from Joseph Roths Hotel Savoy, whose main character stays in the unwanted upper floors. Those who lived on high were in the depths, buried in airy graves, and the graves were in layers above the comfortable rooms of the well nourished guests sitting down below, untroubled by the flimsy coffins overhead.

Even after elevator buildings began appearing in New York, it took years to convince tenants to live in the upper reaches. In the first commercial building with an elevator, the Equitable Life headquarters, the insurance company took the lower offices, while the eighth floor held the custodians apartment.

Even in 1884, when the Dakota opened on the Upper West Side (the first apartment building geared to the rich), it was assumed the wealthy would rather live closer to the ground.

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How elevators transformed NYCs social landscape