The only elevator museum in the United States of America is on a quiet block of Long Island City, Queens, inside a building that’s mainly the home of a taxi licensing business. It’s easy to get lost on your way there—there’s no sign outside indicating to elevator enthusiasts that they’re in the right place, and even once you’re inside, you have to navigate a maze of hallways lined with framed motivational posters and Greek soccer memorabilia (really) to find the door, which doesn’t exactly shout out, “The largest collection of elevator-related stuff in the country!”
All photos by Taji Ameen.
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The museum is a single room about the size of five mid-sized elevators and contains a breathtaking array of elevator-related stuff, from actual pieces of elevators to a functioning scale model of an elevator to this drumhead signed by Danny Thomas of the 13th Floor Elevators.
The museum is the brainchild of Patrick Carr, who’s been in the elevator business literally his entire life. His dad was an elevator mechanic and began taking Patrick with him on jobs in 1955, when Patrick was 11 years old. “Like a butcher’s kid learns to cut meat, I learned to fix elevators,” Patrick told me as he gave me a tour of his pride and joy. Later he came to own his own elevator repair company, and he now testifies as an expert on elevators in criminal and civil trials. I resisted the urge to ask him if the elevator business was one with a lot of ups and downs.
He’s been collecting pieces of elevators for as long as he’s been working on them. This is his first-ever item, a nameplate from an elevator he picked up more than a century ago:
He’s got a lot of these nameplates on the walls. They’re from as long ago as the 19th century, and some were cool and old-timey looking, even if like me, you aren’t normally into elevator nameplates. Patrick also possesses a lot of catalogues, manuals, and elevator-related literature, which are spread out on the tables.
I asked him how he acquired all of the metal doohickeys, and he explained that elevator repairmen gave them to him, or he took them off of elevators himself. “We’re a bunch of thieves. We take everything that’s not nailed down,” he said. “That one, one of my guys took that off a job in Staten Island. An hour later, we get a call: ‘Hey, my nameplate’s missing!’ I said, ‘Oh, I have no idea.’ It was on my desk already.”
Patrick once built a functioning car out of elevator parts. It looked like this:
Probably the coolest exhibit in the museum was a functioning scale model of an elevator, which Patrick had gotten from an engineering grad student who had built it as part of his thesis. Patrick fiddled with it for a second, then turned it on and we watched the elevator move up and down. There’s something fundamentally satisfying about watching a piece of machinery do its job smoothly. Elevators are cool the way model trains or remote-controlled cars are cool—that is, they make the 12-year-old boy inside you very, very pleased.
Patrick, who also has a collection of 4 million stamps, is one of those old guys—you can find them all over New York—who have an almost endless supply of anecdotes and factoids stored in their heads, waiting for a cue to be released into the world. Ask him about the book of elevator-related history he came out with in 2003, for instance, and he’ll say something like:
“Most of us growing up in New York or studying history know about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, but we don’t know that the elevator operator, Joe Zito, ran his elevator until the cables melted. Or about the woman who was in the elevator at the Empire State building that crashed when the plane hit it. She survived the 77-floor fall and went on to have four kids. Or that the first elevator of professional baseball was at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.”
He also told me the only elevator-operator joke I’ve ever heard (that Poles make lousy elevator operators because they keep forgetting the route), and expressed how annoyed he is with the elevator-related factual errors that crop up in Hollywood movies. In the middle of his tour, he started smoking some cigarettes, and I found out that even the ashtray in this place was elevator-related.
The museum’s less than a year old, and Patrick is in the middle of the process of getting it accredited as a non-profit, which involves meticulously documenting the condition of every single item in his collection. If he gets certified as a non-profit museum, people will be able to write off donations to the Elevator Museum as tax write-offs, and he might be able to expand. “Every oak starts with an acorn,” he said, adding that he’s working with a local union to move to a building of theirs on Long Island where there’s more space. One day, his museum could compete with the world’s only other elevator museum, which is in Hungary.
On my way out, I ask about the mannequins stationed right outside the door wearing Montgomery Elevator Co. uniforms, and Patrick tells me that they’re a way to add some variety to the exhibits. You can only have so many elevator parts and nameplates before most people’s eyes start to glaze over, after all. “To me, elevators are fun enough,” Patrick said, “but to most people, they’re not.”
