[txt]

Cool article. Ive done alot of specialty flooring jobs in the city and have been in some amazing buildings. They forgot to mention the amount of service elevators that are required to have a operator. My favorite was 20 broadway, rockafella standard oil building. There service elevator was 100+ years old, you could maybe fit 4 people in it. You have to take 1 elevator down then walk accross a super creepy basement with random staircases that lead to arch doorways of brick, broken concrete.Really cool stuff. The operator was a real bundle of joy too. If you juiced him, he would get you and your tools up before anybody else, ive seen this quite a few times. The floor i was working on too was intresting, it was a old lawyers office, there was an illumaniti triangle designed in the orginal concrete from 1928, and they made a big deal about not touching it the entire project (it was cracked, had holes) I ended up repairing it on one of the last days.

[theoh]

http://deadword.com/site1/pay/work/stories/004/index.htm

[_nalply]

No pictures and only tangentially related but interesting anyway.

[theoh]

I intended to quote this passage, but had phone problems:

"And then, after the service entrances, you have to ride in the service elevators. These are some of the scariest places in the world, if you ask me. New York is full of old ones that are operated by cables. And the high rise types are like being inside wind tunnels--try riding in one with too much weight. We had to lift this 1000 pound marble slab into the elevator of the UN apartment building because it was too long to go straight in. It took about six of us to lift it. Then, while it was leaning against the elevator wall and we were underneath it, the car started to drop erratically because of the weight. We got stuck in there for almost an hour; the whole time was spent thinking we were going to die, telling stupid jokes about disaster movies and trying not to shit in our pants. This was done for this bachelor type who had nothing but Hawaiian shirts in his closet. Family money from aluminum, I think.

The service entrances and elevators make you realize that you are part of the lower class and I guess, in that, the architects have succeeded in some perverse way. I mean, you feel like a service person when you are in them--you know where you are and why you're there. It's very humiliating--as is being treated like shit by the owners and the doormen and everyone else--but it makes a certain amount of sense, architecturally. I just wish I could make every architect who designed a small elevator or a dangerous service entrance come on the truck with us for one day, so I could show them what idiots they are. I have a real distaste for architects now. Look at all the ugly buildings in New York City and remember: they are worse on the inside."

[mstade]

Got any pictures anywhere?