Elevator of the Year: Modernization of the Metropolis Trust Building
starelevator.com
starelevator.com
A garage I went to subscribed to a trade magazine for towing and recovery companies and left the issues in the waiting room. Sure enough, they had a recovery of the year type of award.
So there are good use cases for capital if you are in that market.
They're cheaper to produce than a full-scale conference (needing just a 1 day hire of a hotel ballroom or similar) and are easy to sell - every business or team nominated for an award will pay for a table, as will various suppliers and vendors who see it as a great marketing opportunity.
on the other hand, I found it hilarious one of my father's old companies publicly sponsored a special new category of award at a legit-seeming construction event. You'll never guess who won...
I mean, you should... but there's still a lot of wiggle room on the way from doesn't meet modern code / never met code / shouldn't be done / is unsanitary or unsafe / will not work.
Residential electric is easier to do in ways that work but are either not to code or not to common best practice. The handier the previous owner was, the more new ways to do things you can learn. If a previous owner was in the trades and also heavily involved in the initial build, expect lots of weird repairs. :p
https://soundquality.org/2025/04/chicagos-last-manually-oper...
Maybe they shut it down already and are reading Elevator World for replacement ideas. A glass one please!
Up and Then Down (2014) By Nick Paumgarten https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-do...
[1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669edd08b2a3fe...
Fun! :D
The font salad reminds me of the 1980s, when novel desktop publishing apps first gave every computer user a large selection of fonts.
For certain values of "I", and depending on the baseline cost of operating an elevator!
The photo of one of the brake assembly components mounted to a welded tubular skid, bolted to a large structure of I-beams, bolted to another I-beam skid which is bolted to the floor, is tickling me as slightly humorous.
> Due to the placement of the machines under the hoistways, and the need for proper rope lead off of the overhead sheaves, the counterweights did not run in the same hoistways as the cars. This makes for a long, complicated rope scheme – each car had over ¾ of a mile of hoistrope!
Getting the new machinery up to the top was a miserable job. The article hints at this. "The Metropolis Trust Building is located on one of the busiest corners in San Francisco; so there was no chance to use cranes. And the building itself offered limited access; there was no loading dock or service entrance. All equipment had to enter through the front door – including 20’ pieces of reinforcing steel and 4,000 lb gearless hoist machines." They had to remove two elevators and cabs to get an empty hoistway so they could lift all that stuff. They had to get lifting equipment up to the top. They had an existing elevator to help, but they still had to move stuff from the top elevator stop to the top machine room above, somehow. This brings up images of a lot of big guys, chain falls, small electric hoists carried into position by hand to move larger electric hoists, and lots of temporary steel beams and timber baulks. This was probably night work, because all this blocked the building entrance and lobby. They got a 20 foot steel beam in the front door, into an elevator shaft, hauled it up to the top, got it out, raised it one more floor, and put it into position. That was just a small part of the job.
That's why nobody replaced the machinery for 110 years. It's also why elevator mechanics are one of the highest paid trades.
They put in a modern gearless traction elevator machine, which is mostly a big motor directly connected to a big pulley. The mechanical part is far simpler now. The controls shrink, too. The old AC-DC motor generator set gets replaced by a box of high-powered semiconductors about a cubic foot in size. The big relay panels get replaced by a microprocessor control box. This is just a 15 story building, so those are all standard components.
Too bad there's no video. Star Elevator did post a video of another job at the Oakland Tribune.[1] That didn't have the access problem from hell.
[1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/669edd08b2a3fe788c227...
This building is at Market & New Montgomery, and was built in 1907, and has an award-winning elevator.
For some years I worked on the same block, at the corner of Market & 2nd St. That building (605 Market) was built in 1917 and if that elevator wins any awards it’ll be for slowness and low-availability. It was constantly out of service, and when it did run it was so slow that it was faster to take the stairs, even to the top floor.
I was once in the elevator room, among other oddities was the most monstrously large mechanical computer I’ve ever seen, managing the elevator.
I wonder if it’s finally been replaced.
I’d be interested is reading a more technical article about the project management part of this process.
Turns out they are replacing the ancient non-standard stuff with modern standard stuff. How the ancients did it before we knew better is interesting - and you can't fault them for not knowing what we know now.
By contrast, the web design is overpriced, hard to use, non-standard garbage. I'm sure that will win an aware despite being an example of how not to do web pages.
"Power consumption is down 45% - 50% annually."
Well is it 45 or 50? Is this a measurement or prediction or a random number? From an engineer or marketing? If prediction, why not saying so? Is this a range for several years depending on elevator usage?
Things like this irk me a lot.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the savings was the new lights are LED while the old only incandescent was available - this is just speculation though, I have no idea. Every gear and every stretch of the ropes cost a little bit of efficiency and the modern system has less of those.
It’s definitely not the lighting, you only need a few thousand lumens to have bright elevator lighting. If you need 4000 lumens, that is (5) 60W incandescent lamps, switching to LEDs that do 100 lumens per watt (8W lamp) saves you 260 watts/hr.
The new elevator uses a VFD (they call it a VVVF) to control the motor which is where virtually all of the gains come from. Lowering the speed of the motor lowers the power usage, it’s a non-linear relationship but a motor spinning at 75% speed uses 1/4 to 1/3rd of the power that it would use at full speed.
> They likely only have whole building power consumption
You can easily measure the power of a single circuit or single panelboard using a submeter: https://www.shopemondirect.com/catalog/shop/Shop-E-Mon-Direc...
The lights may be running 24x7, while the elevator motor is only running when it is moving, which is why I wouldn't be surprised if they used more power than the motors. Of course I have no information on how this building is used.
I'm sure they'll notice the change.
It saves you 260 watts, continuously.
But my best guess is they simply _cannot know_ because the usage patterns of the new elevators will be different from the old elevators based on dispatching and sequencing and call systems. In other words, even if they know the exact consumption of the old system, and even if they expect precisely the same number of passengers per day, the _actual operating cost_ will depend on who arrives in the lobby, at what time, destined for which floors, and all other traffic patterns throughout the year.