Why you Should Think Twice Before Complaining about Elevator Service
By: Ashlyn O’Hara
Few topics evoke such ardent responses from members of the New School community as elevators. Transcending year level, school, and aesthetic preference alike, everyone has something to say about our elevators. But how rational, reasonable, and grounded in reality are those frustrations? I spoke with The New School’s Vice President for Design, Construction and Facilities Management Lia Gartner in an attempt to better understand the role of elevators at The New School.
There are exactly twenty buildings that make up The New School. All together they hold fifty elevators including regular elevators, sidewalk elevators, and dumbwaiters. Parsons and the University Center boast eight each, followed by Lang at seven, and Arnold Hall at six. However Gartner, who holds a BA from Harvard as well as a master’s
degree in architecture from Columbia, addressed specifically the fundamental issues surrounding elevators at The New School.
“Elevators have a very limited function,” she explained, “Elevators are finite. They are not magic.” For Gartner, the problem with The New School’s elevators lies not in how many there are, how big the are, how fast they move, or how often they are renovated, but rather the fact of their very existence.
Because The New School only owns two of its twenty buildings, there is only so much school officials such as Lia can do to curb the stress of elevators. For example, the elevators in the Albert and Vera List Academic Center at 6 E 16th Street, a universal source of frustration among New School students, present more complex issues than just inconvenient elevators.
One of students’ biggest complaints about the 16th St. building is that there are no stairs to the 6th floor, forcing students to wait in lines for the elevator that often stretch to the door. What many students don’t know, however, is that because The New School doesn’t own the building, another company occupies the first five floors. If students were allowed to take the stairs on the first five floors, anyone with access via 5th Avenue could also bypass New School security and enter New School classrooms. For obvious reasons, this poses a major security risk for students and staff.
Gartner expressed frustration at the reluctance of New School students to factor elevators into their New York City lifestyle. “In New York you wait for the subway,” she said, “You wait for the bus.” Students should therefore accept elevators as a necessary nuisance of city life. Just as you would for the train, Gartner recommends factoring wait times into your schedule. Be prepared to wait, so you won’t run late.
A key example of elevator innovation at The New School is seen at the University Center. Built in 2013, Gartner walked through how it is designed specifically to avoid the type of chaos so often witnessed at 16th St. At any given time, there are three thousand people in the University Center. In order to successfully transport all three thousand students to different floors during rush hour, Gartner estimated that the UC would need twenty large elevators running in express mode. If all twenty had been constructed, though, there would be virtually no floor space – it would be all elevators.
But what to do? Gartner saw the opportunity to incorporate what she believes to be the solution to The New School’s elevator problem – stairs. While all of The New School’s buildings have required fire stairwells, they are often isolated from the rest of the building and intended for emergency use only.
When you walk into the UC, the wide staircase is one of the first things you notice, even before you encounter the elevators. The staircase, which accesses all six of the UC’s main levels, presents itself as a reasonable mode of transportation in ways the stairs of other New School buildings do not. In fact, even though the UC ultimately only included five large elevators, they have never had to run in “skip stop” (express) mode. It thus is an entirely different case than 16th.
There are only so many ways to work around the architectural environment of The New School, Lia stressed. Between lack of building ownership, the vertical environment of New York City, and the inherent slowness and tightness of elevators, little can be done to improve our current situation.
So what advice does Lia have for New School Students? Factor in wait times and plan accordingly, acknowledge the inherently inconvenient of elevators used in an academic setting, and explore the other options available to you. The New School is fortunate to incorporate so many landmark buildings into its unique urban campus, however, Lia concluded, it must be acknowledged that many of our complaints are unavoidable side affects; “It’s the nature of elevators, and it’s the nature of the buildings.”