The Vertical Streets: How Elevators Quietly Rewrote the Modern City

By 8:37 a.m., the line has formed.

Not outside the building—that theater is for tourists and smokers—but inside, in a marble lobby that smells faintly of coffee and printer toner. The turnstiles beep people through. A small crowd gathers around a set of stainless‑steel doors. Nobody talks.

There’s a choreography to it. The woman in the navy blazer glances at her watch, shifts her weight, taps the “up” button with practiced impatience. A man with a bike helmet clips it to his backpack and steps just a bit too close; the rest of the group tightens slightly, recalibrating their spacing without a word. Half the people are staring at their phones. The other half are staring at nothing at all.

Then: a soft chime, a small green arrow, doors opening.

In eight seconds, twenty‑two strangers shuffle into a metal box. They pivot to face the door, as if posing for an invisible photographer. The doors close; the world outside shrinks to a seam of light. The elevator shudders and begins to rise.

Fifteen seconds later, it’s over. People spill out onto the 17th floor and fan into carpets and cubicles and video calls. The elevator, empty again, hummed back down to fetch the next micro‑platoon.

This little ritual repeats itself billions of times a day on Earth.

We make jokes about “awkward elevator small talk,” but we almost never talk about the elevator itself—this blunt, taken‑for‑granted machine that quietly made the modern city possible, reordered social class by floor number, and now decides who actually gets to participate in multi‑story life at all.

If roads and railways are the stage of modernity, elevators are its pulleys and counterweights—hidden in the wings, lifting and lowering people into scenes on cue.

And once you start paying attention to them, you realize: we don’t just live with elevators. We live inside the world they created.

---

Imagine being in an apartment you cannot leave, not because you’re imprisoned, but because a machine in the hallway has been broken for seven weeks.

In 2024, a French newspaper profiled a wheelchair user near Lyon who, after the elevator in her building failed, found herself effectively trapped on the upper floors of her own home. Medical appointments were missed. Groceries became a chain of favors. Neighbors in similar buildings described “home confinement” that could last months when aging elevators broke down; one older tenant reportedly spent a night in a garbage room because firefighters would only come if someone was stuck inside the lift, not stranded outside it.(lemonde.fr)

Suddenly the elevator isn’t a convenience. It’s your legs. When it fails, a perfectly healthy apartment becomes a kind of vertical prison.

The more you look, the more these quiet machines show up at the center of big, messy human questions: Who gets access? Who lives on top of whom? How do we spend our energy, our patience, our fear?

But to see any of that, you have to zoom out from the little metal box and watch how the story started.

---

For most of history, “height” was a hobby for gods and lunatics.

We built tall things, of course—cathedrals, ziggurats, towers—but they were special projects, undertaken slowly, like carving a sculpture out of a mountain. Everyday life happened on the ground floor and maybe one flight up. Anything higher was for bells, birds, and unlucky servants.

Humans have been lifting stuff with hoists and winches for at least two thousand years; there are Roman accounts of the Colosseum using 24 manually operated platforms—powered by teams of slaves—to send wild animals and gladiators erupting into the arena.(connectionselevator.com) But these were stage tricks. They did not yet form a transportation system, much less a culture.

The missing piece wasn’t the ability to pull something up. It was the ability to stop it from falling.

In the early 1800s, industrial buildings started using simple hoists to lift freight between floors. Imagine a platform on a rope and a rule that said: “Don’t be under this when it breaks.” Ropes did break, and enough workers died that “elevator” meant “dangerous, but faster than carrying sacks by hand.” No sane person wanted to be a passenger on one.

Then, in 1854, a 43‑year‑old mechanic named Elisha Otis walked into a glass palace and performed one of the greatest product demonstrations of all time.

At New York’s Crystal Palace exhibition, under a dome of iron and glass, Otis rode a platform hoisted high above a crowd. At his signal, an assistant swung an axe and severed the only supporting rope. The platform dropped a few inches. The crowd screamed.

Then it stopped.

A spring‑loaded brake had snapped into notched rails along the shaft, catching the platform before it plummeted. Otis, composed on his now‑hanging stage, announced, “All safe, gentlemen. All safe.”(culturenow.org)

This was not just showmanship. It was a trust hack. It turned the elevator from a death machine into a device you could imagine your children stepping into.

Within a few years, Otis’s company had installed the first commercial passenger elevator in a New York department store.(en.wikipedia.org) Within a few decades, steel skeletons and safe lifts fused into a new architectural species: the skyscraper.

Rem Koolhaas once described this as a technological marriage: the elevator meets the steel frame, and suddenly “any given site can now be multiplied ad infinitum” into stacked floors of human activity.(architectureandurbanism.blogspot.com) You didn’t have to walk up 17 flights of stairs anymore. Height had become a service, not a punishment.

And that simple change—“You may now go up without suffering for it”—quietly rewired almost everything about how cities feel.

---

One of the most peculiar things elevators did was flip the social map of buildings upside down.

Before passenger elevators, the “good” apartments and offices were on the lower floors. Air conditioning was rare; carrying anything up multiple flights was a chore; if you were important, you lived closer to the street, where carriages could whisk you away without climbing. Servants, maids, and poor families got the cramped attic rooms just under the roof, where soot, heat, and leaks collected.(olympicelevator.com)

You can still see this logic fossilized in some old European buildings—fancy stone on the first floors, then meaner little dormer windows peeking from the roofline like a row of apologetic eyebrows.

Elevators broke that hierarchy.

Once you could glide upwards without effort or social embarrassment, “top floor” stopped meaning “punishment detail” and started to mean “view.” In 1920s New York, developers began experimenting with something new: the penthouse. The Plaza Hotel built one for cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post—a sprawling, multi‑floor residence on the roof that proved New Yorkers would not just tolerate living at the top, but pay extraordinary sums for it.(hgtv.com)

Penthouses proliferated. The idea went global. One article on the history of penthouses notes that the top floor, once thought “as unhealthy and dangerous as the cellar,” was transformed in the postwar period into “the most expensive apartment in the building,” all thanks to the elevator.(olympicelevator.com)

Fast‑forward a century, and the “mansion in the sky” is an international genre. In Manhattan, a triplex penthouse atop Central Park Tower spans more than 17,000 square feet across floors 129 to 131, branded as “The One Above All Else.” It’s reached by private high‑speed elevators and priced in the realm where numbers lose their ordinary meaning.(luxe.digital) In Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, developers market the Sky Palace—two stories of raw space more than a thousand feet above the ground, accessible via a private lift.(luxe.digital) Cities from Monaco to Brisbane now showcase super‑tall penthouses as trophies, each accessible by keyed elevator.

In less than five generations, the elevator turned the attic from servant’s quarters into status symbol.

The direction “up” did not change. Our relationship to it did.

It’s hard to overstate how odd this is from a historical perspective. For almost all of human existence, the powerful wanted to be near the ground: near the gate, near the water, near the horses and the people. Elevators allowed the wealthy to withdraw into the sky—to trade proximity for perspective.

We talk about “social mobility” as a metaphor. With elevators, social mobility literally became vertical.

If you want to understand a city’s politics, you can do worse than asking a very simple question: Who gets the upper floors, and how do they get there?

---

We tend to think of transportation as something that happens outdoors: cars in lanes, buses at stops, trains in tunnels. But in a dense city, a huge amount of transportation happens inside buildings, and it has its own hidden schedules, bottlenecks, and capacity limits.

Consider a few numbers.

There are more than a million elevators and escalators in the United States alone.(gitnux.org) Globally, estimates range from 10 to 20 million elevators in operation, with hundreds of thousands more installed each year as urbanization pushes skylines higher.(standard.co.uk) One industry analysis suggests that elevators carry over two billion passengers per day worldwide—more individual journeys than almost any other transport mode on Earth.(gitnux.org)

In Spain, which has one of the highest elevator densities per capita, 950,000 elevators reportedly make more than a hundred million trips per day—in a single country.(en.wikipedia.org) New York City alone has over 70,000 elevators shuttling office workers, residents, and tourists.(gitnux.org)

Elevators don’t just move a lot of people; they shape entire buildings around their needs.

Take the Empire State Building. When it opened in 1931, it boasted 64 Otis elevators in a central core—four expresses that ran from the lobby to the 80th floor and 60 locals for the tiers above and below. They were designed to move about 10,000 people per hour.(en.wikipedia.org) That capacity dictated the size of the core, the rentable floor area, even the building’s famous stepped silhouette.

Or consider the original World Trade Center towers. Their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, faced a nasty bit of math: As buildings get taller, you need more elevator shafts to move people quickly, but those shafts eat into the very floor space you’re building to sell. His solution was the “sky lobby”: instead of one bank of elevators running the entire height, he created multiple elevator zones linked by transfer floors, saving roughly 70% of the shaft space a conventional design would have required.(en.wikipedia.org)

Today’s supertalls push these tricks even further. Double‑deck elevators—two cars stacked in a single shaft, one serving even floors and one odd—let more people ride without adding more holes in the core.(en.wikipedia.org) Destination‑control systems ask you for your floor before you board, grouping passengers with similar destinations and routing them to an assigned car, like an invisible dispatcher for vertical buses.

In a sense, every tall building contains a small, privately operated transit network. The timetables are coded into control software; the route map is a cluster of shafts hidden behind drywall.

You can see the human cost of small inefficiencies in that network. An IBM “Smarter Buildings” survey once estimated that office workers in just sixteen U.S. cities collectively spent the equivalent of ninety‑two years in a single year waiting for elevators.(rediff.com) Another industry stat suggests that a typical office employee in a high‑rise spends nearly two full days per year inside elevators—riding, waiting, stopping on floors they don’t care about.(gitnux.org)

We obsess over shaving fifteen minutes off a commute, but we rarely notice the friction of these micro‑delays, stacked and compounded in vertical space.

If city streets were this opaque—if you pushed a button and a car just appeared with no schedule, no route map, no public accountability—we’d call it dystopian. In skyscrapers, we call it Tuesday.

---

But the most consequential thing about elevators isn’t how many billions of rides they give successful executives and harried interns.

It’s who can’t take the stairs.

The modern elevator is, among other things, an accessibility device. Many of the people who rely on it most—wheelchair users, those with limited mobility, the elderly, parents with strollers—aren’t just saving time or breath. The elevator often determines whether they can participate in a place at all.

Disability advocates have been pointing this out for decades, and law has gradually caught up. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) generally requires new multi‑story public buildings and many commercial facilities to provide an accessible route—which usually means an elevator—connecting all occupied floors. There’s a “small building” exemption for structures under three stories or with less than 3,000 square feet per floor, but it doesn’t apply to shopping malls, transportation hubs, or healthcare offices, which must have elevators regardless of height.(archive.ada.gov)

Even where an elevator isn’t legally mandated, the design standards around them hint at how much thought goes into inclusive use. Doors must stay open at least three seconds and be wide enough for a wheelchair. Control panels need large buttons, Braille labels, and audible floor announcements. Cars have to be deep and wide enough to turn a mobility device.(buildings.com)

All of that effort only matters, though, if the elevator actually works.

That’s what made the French “home confinement” stories so poignant. Advocates there estimate about 1.5 million elevator malfunctions per year, many in social housing towers filled with low‑income, older, or disabled residents. When a lift is out for weeks, people miss not just social outings but surgeries, dialysis appointments, physical therapy. Some describe feeling abandoned by the city, watching life continue far below their window while they remain suspended above it.(lemonde.fr)

This is one of those failures that hides inside language. If you say, “My car broke down, so I’m stuck,” everyone understands the drama: it’s big, smelly, and obvious. If you say, “The elevator is out, so I’m stuck,” the people who can walk don’t always feel how literal that is.

From far away, lifts can seem like mere conveniences. Close up, they look more like legs made of steel.

If you’re designing or managing a building and you get this wrong—if your elevator strategy is an afterthought or a budget line to be squeezed—what you’re really deciding is whose movement is optional.

---

Because elevator rides are so short, we underestimate how much of our social life flows through them.

You can see this most starkly in the behavior of strangers sharing a small cab.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall coined the term proxemics to describe the invisible bubbles we maintain around our bodies. Within about half a meter is “intimate distance,” reserved for people we trust deeply. Beyond that is “personal” and then “social” distance—the rings we use for acquaintances, colleagues, and crowds. When others breach those zones uninvited—pressing close in a line, crowding on a sidewalk—we feel a prickle of anxiety or annoyance.(en.wikipedia.org)

An elevator is a machine specifically designed to violate these boundaries.

When you pack half a dozen strangers into a six‑by‑six‑foot metal box, everybody is instantly in everybody else’s personal space. We respond with a set of small, almost universal moves. We stand facing the door. We avoid sustained eye contact. We glue our gaze to neutral objects: ceiling, floor, button panel, phone screen.

Sociologist Erving Goffman called this dance civil inattention: the delicate balance between acknowledging each other’s presence (a brief glance) and giving each other permission to ignore that presence (looking away).(en.wikipedia.org) It’s a way of saying, wordlessly, “I see you; I will not impose on you.”

Psychologists have likened this to how primates behave when forced into tight quarters. Dario Maestripieri, a University of Chicago researcher who studies rhesus macaques, notes that when you confine two monkeys in a small cage, they retreat to opposite corners, avoid eye contact, and try not to touch—behaviors aimed at reducing the risk of aggression. Humans in elevators, he argues, do much the same thing. Our brains still flag enforced closeness with unknown individuals as a potentially dangerous situation, even if our rational minds know we’re in an office building, not a jungle.(forbes.com)

This helps explain one of the elevator’s oddest features: the mirror.

Mirrors started appearing in lifts partly to combat claustrophobia. Seeing depth and your own reflection makes the space feel larger, less coffin‑like. But they also serve as subtle social tools. In a mirrored cab, you can avert your eyes from the people next to you by looking at them indirectly. You watch the whole group in the glass, check your hair, or monitor who’s behind you without staring at anyone’s actual face. Social tension drains away a little.(dxbnewsnetwork.com)

There’s accessibility logic here too: for wheelchair users or people with limited neck mobility, mirrored walls make it easier to see controls, doors, and other passengers without twisting painfully.(dxbnewsnetwork.com)

If you’ve ever done a “breaching experiment”—turning to face everyone in a silent elevator, or cracking an offbeat joke—you know how finely tuned these rules are. People laugh or shift or shut down, but they notice. It’s as if the elevator is one of society’s tiny laboratories, testing how we manage micro‑conflicts in crowded spaces.

That’s the paradox: elevators compress us physically but isolate us socially. Twenty people can be crammed into a few square meters, each pretending, for fifteen seconds, that the others do not exist.

And yet, over years, those seconds add up. If you work in the same building long enough, the elevator becomes a weird little village square. You start to recognize the guy with the neon running shoes, the woman with the same thermos every day, the security guard who holds the door at 5:01 p.m. Sharp little communities form: “the 12th‑floor bunch,” “the early‑morning crew.”

Most of these relationships never go anywhere. Some become hallway nods. A few become lunch. Every so often, they become full‑blown friendships, projects, marriages.

You ride an elevator for the views and the efficiency, but you also ride in a capsule of raw city: diverse, compressed, ephemeral. A hundred accidental meetings your calendar never planned.

---

Modern elevators don’t just shift our bodies. They also quietly tax, and occasionally rescue, our energy systems.

Globally, buildings account for roughly a third of total final energy consumption, and elevators and escalators can consume anywhere from 2% to 10% of a building’s operating energy, spiking to as much as 40% during peak traffic periods in tall office towers.(mdpi.com) Multiply that by millions of buildings and billions of trips, and the global elevator fleet starts to look like a not‑so‑tiny power plant.

The good news is that small upgrades can yield big savings. A review of vertical mobility systems in high‑rise buildings found that modernized elevators with regenerative drives and smarter controls often cut energy use by 30–40% compared to older installations. One case study estimated that adding regenerative technology increased upfront costs by about 10% but reduced energy consumption by 300 MWh per year, paying back the investment in a little over two years.(mdpi.com)

At global scale, the same paper estimated that elevators may account for the equivalent of roughly 347 million tons of oil in energy consumption annually. More efficient designs could, in theory, save about 125 million tons of that—a climate lever hiding in plain sight, in hotel lobbies and apartment cores.(link.springer.com)

Manufacturers and building owners are starting to pay attention. Companies like KONE point out that there are now more than 10 million aging elevators and escalators worldwide; in the European Union, the vast majority of building stock predates modern efficiency standards. They pitch modernization not only as a safety and user‑experience upgrade but as a way to reduce buildings’ carbon footprints.(kone.com)

Again, this is invisible work. It’s hard to get excited about a new motor controller the way people do about solar panels or electric cars. An elevator that uses 30% less electricity looks exactly like one that wastes it. But if we’re serious about living well in dense cities without cooking the planet, these dull details matter.

The same box that once symbolized fearless ascent—Otis cutting his rope under the Crystal Palace dome—now also symbolizes whether we can reinvent our inherited systems with more subtlety than bravado.

---

If you want a crash course in how power and design intertwine, you could do worse than study an elevator control panel.

Who gets their own button? Who needs a key? Which floors are locked out after hours? Where is the “Service” mode that repurposes a car from ferrying executives to hauling crates? Is there a priority call feature so that, say, a fire service, or a penthouse owner, can seize a lift out of normal rotation?

Most of this is set once, offstage, by programmers and building managers, then enforced by the machine with perfect obedience. No arguing with an elevator that doesn’t stop at 21 after 7 p.m. No negotiating with an algorithm that decides your acceptable wait time is 45 seconds, not 10.

This is not subtle. It is structural.

A luxury residential tower may dedicate entire private lifts to triplex units at the top while service workers share a separate “back of house” system through loading docks and basement corridors. A hospital may reserve high‑speed lifts for trauma cases, while visitors ride locals that stop at every floor. An office can quietly route contractors, cleaners, and food‑delivery riders away from the polished main lobbies and into service elevators lined with bumpers and plywood.

None of this is inherently evil. But it is a daily reminder that while city streets are at least nominally public, the vertical streets that connect those streets to million‑dollar views are not.

Governments regulate parts of this world—safety codes, ADA compliance, emergency operation—but the everyday experience of moving up and down in a city is mostly shaped by private incentives.

Sometimes this works beautifully. Think of an airport where coordinated banks of escalators and elevators whisk people between trains, ticketing, security, and gates with minimal friction. Sometimes it fails so hard we notice: a crowded subway station with a single aging elevator, out of service half the time, forcing wheelchair users to travel stops out of their way or not at all.

Between those extremes lies the ordinary reality: the elevator as a kind of private bus, where you are both passenger and cargo, subject to decisions made long ago in someone else’s spreadsheet.

---

What do we do with all of this?

You, reading this, probably can’t redesign a city’s vertical transit or single‑handedly modernize Europe’s elevator fleet. But you can choose what kind of attention you bring to the machines that move you.

There is a habit that urbanists and good designers share: they treat friction as data.

The next time you press an elevator button, you can pay attention—or not. If you do, a mundane experience starts to unfold as something like a text to read.

On your way in, notice where the button panel is. Is it low enough for a child or wheelchair user to reach? Are the labels Brailled and backlit? That’s someone, somewhere, taking an accessibility standard seriously—or not.

As you ride, feel the motion. Does the acceleration jerk your stomach, or is it gentle enough that your coffee barely ripples? That’s a tuning decision, balancing speed and comfort.

When the doors open at a busy floor, watch the micro‑negotiations of who exits first, who holds the door, who pretends not to see someone rushing. There’s an entire theater of courtesy condensed into a breath or two.

Glance, if it feels safe, at the people you share the car with. You’re in a temporary community with a countdown timer. What are the rules you’re all following without quite realizing it? Silence? Phone‑checking? Small talk about the weather? Once you’ve seen it, you can choose occasionally—judiciously—to tweak the script: a nod, a “have a good one,” a joke about the elevator’s creaks that makes the old man in the corner smile.

If the elevator is old, listen to the sound of its relays and groans, signs of mechanical age and likely energy inefficiency. If it’s sleek and fast, notice how the cabin’s lighting, mirrors, and materials are consciously trying to make you forget the physics at work.

None of this is about becoming an elevator nerd (though the world has those, and they are delightful). It’s about training a certain kind of vision.

Elevators are just one example of something much larger: the fabric of invisible machines, defaults, and design choices that quietly structure modern life. Trash chutes. Water pressure. Card readers. Timetables. All the boring, sturdy miracles that determine what possibilities actually reach you.

Noticing them for fifteen seconds at a time doesn’t change the world. But it does change you.

You start to see how many of your daily frustrations aren’t personal failures but emergent properties of poorly tuned systems. You see where access is generous and where it’s stingy. You notice how often the people most affected by a design—older tenants on the upper floors, delivery workers looping between lobby and sky, kids navigating school stairwells—were never really in the room when that design was drawn.

You also, occasionally, get to feel awe.

Because underneath all the awkwardness and impatience, it is wild that we built machines that lift us hundreds of feet in the air, quietly, safely, billions of times a day. It is wild that a forgotten demonstration in 1854, in a glass palace that no longer exists, helped make it normal for a person with a heart condition to live on the 25th floor, for a billionaire to sleep 1,300 feet above a park, for a nurse to traverse a hospital’s 12 stories in seconds.

When you step into an elevator, you’re riding a rope that runs back through history: through Otis’s “All safe, gentlemen,” through Roman arenas and medieval hoists, through legislative fights and engineering PhDs and maintenance crews with grease on their hands at 3 a.m.

You are, in a very literal way, suspended in the story of how we decided to live on top of one another.

The doors close. The chime sings. For a moment, the entire weight of your body is held not by your own muscles but by an arrangement of steel, software, and human promises.

Most days, it feels like nothing.

But in that nothing, a whole world is going up and down.