A friend from Gramercy Park lived there, and until 1994 it had the city's last hydraulic elevator, powered by pressure from a water main.
As well as being a gloriously appointed Victorian house museum, it is an early example of postindustrial sustainable architecture: completed in 1870, it was the first building in the world to use hydroelectricity, with its lights and elevator powered by a water pump and turbine engine fed by a nearby stream.
It was a dark and dangerous, yet extraordinarily well organized place, where wild beasts, animals, gladiators and condemned criminals waited to be brought onstage via trap doors, ramps or elevators powered by men.
The two-year-old, 48-story City Towers Toyosu, with 1,063 apartments in two towers, is fitted with emergency elevators powered by backup generators that can start automatically and operate for up to seven hours.
Fast Otis elevators powered by electricity rather than steam-driven hydraulics began to be installed in skyscrapers for the first time, with Ellithorpe safety air cushions protecting the passengers in the case of failure.
The device first cuts off elevator power; if excessive speed continues, it applies the safety brake.
As the basic design of the space elevator power system is solar power only, the first 40 km is hazardous to operations and demands enclosed packaging of fragile tether climbers.
If there's any stretch of this river that doesn't hum and throb — with barges, tugs, grain elevators, power plants, coal depots, refineries — I didn't see it.
At this point there was five feet of water in her lobby, and the elevators' power was out.
The Obayashi Corporation, one of Japan's five big construction companies, last year published plans for a more robust space elevator carrying robotic cars powered by maglev motors similar to those used on high speed rail lines.
Everything was so immense and out of context, like the large item resting beside them in the mud: one of the motors that once powered the elevators of the twin towers.
