In this blog post, I thoroughly compare New York City's buildings & lifts to Charlotte's buildings & lifts with multiple sources of evidence from major lift enthusiasts who have been to both New York City AND Charlotte.
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| This is NOT my picture, this is from Wikipedia! |
New York City
The buildings
Throughout the Western Hemisphere, many cities look similar to each other, have very similar building designs, but NYC is absolutely no exception to this. The only nice building in New York City are the old historic buildings that are 30 years old or older. Even those are being demolished at alarming rates per year. To make matters worse, the vast percentage of building developers don't even strive to replace the character of the building when they put up a new modern building in its place. Instead, what they will do is they will find the most beautiful looking historic building, tear it down & replace it with a boring looking building where the floors theoretically have the potential of looking the same from the outside of the building itself. Not only that, but over 75% of the modern NYC architecture is bland & has no character, except for some weird looking buildings that appear to have been built by people who theoretically didn't know what the heck they were doing during design.
The picture you see above was taken by a random Wikipedia writer, before the new World Trade Center complex was built. You could clearly see a huge difference between the newer buildings in the front & the older buildings in the back. The older buildings in the back have a lot more character & they are probably over 80 years old, which makes them historic & fun to explore. For the newer buildings up front, you could tell the building developers intentionally left character out of the agenda books. This is a REAL PROBLEM, as they have become paranoid that old buildings are unsafe & need to be demolished, when the real reason they are tearing down the awesome old structures (even the 120-year-old buildings which could withstand the strongest storms) is just to contribute to the amount of boredom already experienced by New York-based building lovers.
For the newer buildings up front, you could tell the building developers intentionally left character out of the agenda books.
In fact, the New York City Skyline was intentionally designed to appear as handsome as King Pittsburgh's skyline from certain points of New Jersey, but once you go into the city, you'll get hit extremely hard by the lack of character in a huge portion of the modern buildings.
Another thing to add on, when a historic building cannot be replaced, building developers will find every way possible to extensively renovate its interior, so theoretically, it's only the facade of the building that shows the building's real age. Meanwhile, you're in the building itself & you feel like you're still in a building from the 2010s.
The lifts
The traction lifts
A bunch of lift enthusiasts from across America (including me) can't stand NYC generic lifts or the buttons they put on the lifts (except for the ones which have Innovation or MAD, which are a very few). In fact, at least 95% of NYC's modern lifts are generic, boring, uninteresting & have little to no character (mainly the traction ones). After watching somewhere around 110 videos on YouTube solely on NYC generic lifts built after 2001, I have come to the conclusion that NYC probably has there own VF logic program to put on there traction lifts which give them exactly the same feel no matter how fast they go. Basically in a nutshell, the only difference between a lift traveling at a speed of 105 M/M & 375 M/M is a longer A/D rate. It takes about 5 seconds on average for a 10-story generic traction lift to go from 0 meters per minute to 105 meters per minute in NYC.
In fact, I have intelligently calculated the A/D rate of a typical NYC generic high speed lift to be 21 M/M/S. When comparing this to other designs of lifts, like the Otis Elevonic 411 or the ThyssenKrupp Momentum, is not time-efficient at all. Just because a lift in NYC travels at a high speed, doesn't mean it's a fast lift! A fast lift could travel very slowly from floor to floor but take less time for the doors to open. This means that a 75-story lift, traveling at a speed of 400 meters per minute, will take 19 seconds from the time it starts decelerating to the time it finishes decelerating & then another 1 to 3 seconds before the doors actually begin opening. That is not fast at all! In fact, if you consider that & a standard hydraulic lift, you will then find the hydraulic lift is actually a lot faster. Waiting a long time for the doors to open when riding a lift when the floor indicator is not changing is extremely boring. This NYC VF technology was purposely designed to make modern generic lifts boring to ride!
Fast does not mean it has to travel at a high speed. Fast is defined by the time it takes from when the lift starts decelerating to the time the doors start moving.
Another thing I would like to point out about a lot of NYC's lifts is that they use some of our least favorite buttons you could put on a lift: Monitor TR (except for 1500) & CRAPCO Super Suck Line. Luckily, New York City does not use CRAPCO Super Suck Line that much on there lifts, but still, it's such a shame that they use it on there lifts, period! What sucks even more is that they are encouraging lift companies to increase there profit by choosing to go with the most bland lift buttons you could put on a lift. I'm talking, Monitor HPS 1300 & Monitor TR. Rarely, if ever, do you see MAD on any generic NYC lift. Innovation NEMA 4X doesn't even look as horrible & I STILL kinda don't like NEMA 4X.
The architects try to further sugarcoat the truth by making a modern cab appear beautiful & attractive to people using the lift. While I do appreciate a beautiful cab, that will not give the lift any more character! I define beauty by how the lift runs & how the buttons look, not by how the cab looks! Beauty is unimportant to the vast majority of lift enthusiasts who see generic lifts as uninteresting. Character is important to us! Heck, you could have the most bland looking lift cab, yet the lift could be a super epic very low-speed hydraulic which is fun to ride due to its character.
The only good places you could go to in NYC for high rise TRACTION lift filming include:
- Marriott Marquis
- Empire State Building
- 30 Rockefeller Center
- One World Observatory, Museum & Mall
- Millennium by Hilton Hotel
- Le Parker Meridien
- ROW NYC (Formerly Milford Plaza)
- W Times Square
- Novotel Times Square
- DoubleTree Times Square
- Crowne Plaza Times Square
- Hilton Conrad
- Hyatt Centric
The hydraulic lifts
However, there is a huge exception to this: there are many nice hydraulic lifts (even the ones with Monitor TR & the most bland looking cabs) which could be found throughout mini stops on the lower 2 or 3 floors of high rise NYC buildings. These hydraulic lifts each run slightly differently from each other & are therefore full of character by the way they run. Down in the 5-story shops (the less floors the better), is where you will find the best lifts. While they are nowhere near as nice as what even Secaucus has, they are still kinda worth filming, if you make your camera focus on how it runs, not on how it looks.
Charlotte
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| NOT MY PICTURE! I got this from Wikipedia! |
The buildings
The buildings in Charlotte (as you see in the above picture, those ones are still being proposed), both historic & modern, have a lot of character in there design. If you see, even the most modern buildings of Charlotte (even the 2-3 story ones) are worth exploring because the building developers there take a lot of pride into their work & strive for absolute character over just creating a place where people work. They build to inspire the community & this is the reason why so many building explorers have fallen to the deepest love with the city of Charlotte.
Unlike New York City, where the building architects create fake-looking facades to make the modern & historic buildings appear to have character from the outside, Charlotte's building architects have character in mind when designing the whole entire building, not just the facade. This is what makes it (or should I say "her") such a beautiful city to admire all of the modern buildings. They simply look angelic & futuristic.
The lifts
While 95% of NYC lifts are completely bland & boring, almost 100% of Charlotte's lifts are worth taking a look at, fun to film & are extremely fun to ride, historic OR modern. The hydraulic lifts each run slightly differently from each other (like NYC), but made by real lift companies (like OTIS, Schindler, ThyssenKrupp or KONE) & have a lot of modern-day character you won't find in most of NYC's standard lifts.
Her standard lifts
According to over 150 videos I & other lift enthusiasts have seen from YouTube, her standard lifts vary widely. Some are OTIS, some are Schindler, some are ThyssenKrupp, some are KONE & the others are good generic lifts with either Innovation buttons or EPCO buttons (except for SSL). 1/10 of Charlotte has Westinghouse lifts & a few buildings have Dover lifts. Not to mention, I found a few Dover Impulse lifts out of the videos I watched & they were quite impressive just by WATCHING.
Therefore, you have a wide array of good lifts worth filming to choose from which serve 2 to 10 floors if you just want to film basic lifts while you're in Charlotte. Or, if you want even more awesome lifts, you may want to check out some of the tall buildings (11 stories or taller), as they have some pretty neat lifts. There is a steady variety between the lifts you'll find, which makes it even more fun to film the high rise lifts. Also, the traction ones run very differently from each other, which is due to the fact that the design of the lifts are different.
Bottom line, if you're looking for standard lifts, you should go to the lower rising buildings (2 to 10 floors), but even still, the standard lifts are pretty nice.
Her worst lifts
While almost 100% of Charlotte's lifts are extremely awesome & worth filming, she does have some boring lifts, but with a city that impressive, the most boring lift there is still nowhere NEAR as boring as even the nicer NYC generic lifts. The worst lifts (least interesting & most boring) you could find in Charlotte have EPCO Survivor Plus buttons, or Innovation NEMA 4X / close lookalike of it. Not to mention, these buttons are mostly found on the hydraulic lifts, so how bad could it be? A bunch of them have slightly different behavior anyway, such as different motor sounds, some of them being very quick hydros, some being time efficient, some scenic. Really, when you're comparing these lifts to NYC's lifts, you'll discover that even the WORST, MOST BORING, LEAST INTERESTING LIFT IN THE ENTIRE CITY OF CHARLOTTE still has a lot of hidden character. A weird floor passing chime is one of the simplest things.
Conclusion
To conclude this blog post, I will have to say, I have always been inspired by the character hiding in Charlotte's buildings & lifts. I am hoping to take my FRIRNDS on a vacation there sometime after I graduate from high school. Therefore, we could strengthen our FRIRNDships.
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