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Very High Tech - Elevator Garages in an NYC Hi-Rise
theodp writes "If the hassle of getting groceries from the parking garage to your 12th floor condo has been holding you back from buying a deluxe apartment in the sky, wait no more. Wired reports on the En-Suite Sky Garages at 200 Eleventh Avenue (Flash) in Chelsea, where an 8,000-pound-capacity freight elevator will whisk your Bentley directly into your pad. The convenience doesn't come cheap — a garage-equipped 2BR starts at $4.7M."
New York parking prices are insane and with all the traffic, it's cheaper and faster to bicycle through the freezing snow and angry muggers. Maybe that will eventually make it a "green" city.
Anti-Globalism
It's like Grand Theft Auto, only you're playing the hooker.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
yay, now along with being stuck in traffic every morning, you also get the pleasure of waiting for your turn to use the damn lift every morning before you can even leave home.
TIAEAE!
This was described fully in Heinlein's "I will Fear No Evil". While the book wasn't exactly great Heinlein, it does describe apartment buildings with elevators for your cars. They are needed because in that worldview, crime was so rampant that your car was an upolstered tank, and your home was a fortress. Happily, that particularly dark vision has yet to come. However, it was written in the years of "burn, baby, burn" and very high crime, so it is certainly fodder for speculative fiction.
Joseph Bacanskas [|] --- I use Smalltalk. My amp goes to eleven.
That means I could make out in a car and an elevator at the same time! If I had a girlfriend, and 4.7 million.. But just think of it! A girlfriend!
I dont know why you assume that the people that will be living in there are hypocrites.
People that care about the environment and live in new york just do not own cars. New York is rare in that it is much more convenient if you do not own a car and it is a complete pain in the ass if you do (and insist on using it). So if you care about the environment the choice is pretty simple.
I think people that will be living in that building just do not give a shit about the environment and need some way to get the out of the city and to the hamptons without having to use public transportation of any kind.
Units, units my friend. While watts is a unit of power, it is not a unit of energy- you probably meant to think kilowatt-hours.
Your equation for energy required to lift a car was wrong- regardless of the units you put on the end, Work = F*distance, not F*time (which is change in momentum)
Your calculations *should* have been:
Work required to lift a 1000kg car 50 meters: W = mg(deltaH) = 1000 * 9.8 * 50 = 490kJ
Work required to lift your car every day for a year: 178.85MJ
In more familiar units, since 1 kWh = 3 600 000 J,
Energy required to lift the car: 0.1361 kWh
Energy required to lift your car per year: 49.68 kWh
Energy required for 100 units: 4.97MHh
I used to live on the 23rd floor of a high-rise in Chicago. Groceries were never a problem. The 1st floor of the building was a grocery store and they delivered with purchases of $20 or more (excluding alcohol and cigarettes). Likewise all the local grocery stores would deliver to your apartment free of charge with a minimum purchase. You could phone or fax your grocery order in and pay for it on delivery (even pay with a check) or you could go down and select your items, pay for them, and one of the box boys would lug the stuff up for you.
It would've been possible for a hermit to never leave the building. The local laundry picked up and delivered for free. The drug store would deliver prescriptions for free. And we had a full gym with half-Olympic pool on the 5th floor. There was even a dog-walk service available for a small fee. That's how things work in inner cities.
I would totally pay for one if i had the cash.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The kind of people who "live" in the really expensive NYC real estate tend to not spend much time there themselves. These apartments are status symbols. Places to send your clients who want something better than a Times Square hotel room. Places to have an occasional party. That sort of thing. The person who has a Bentley and a $5 million apartment in NYC also has a "ranch" outside Denver, a mansion on the Big Island of Hawaii, and an island in the Caribbean... and somebody on the payroll to deal with the Bentley, and drive it, and park it. Not for the owner. For the people the owner is trying to impress...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Re modding up -- that's sadly true; they already have. :)
GP beat me to it. But just to put things in perspective, the energy required to lift your 1000 kg car once is roughly equivalent to leaving a 100 W light bulb lit for 81 mins. Surprisingly modest, actually.
Cheers, Rudi
licet differant, aequabitur
How long these have been in use in Europe? Thirty years? Twenty five? Even in Russia nobody looks at car elevators as something unusual...
This isn't the first. There's at least one apartment building in Dubai with a similar setup. There's CarLoft in Germany. There's one on Charlotte, NC. It's even been done in New York before; there was a writeup in Elevator World.
It would be much more cost effective to pay somebody else to haul your groceries up the stairs.
Though bicycling is preferable, even if it does get you sweaty.
You subscribe to Elevator World?
:P
Wow
You have opened my eyes to a whole new world - Elevator Geeks!
I can picture it now....
"How to overclock your elevator in 5 easy steps..."
"Escalators - Are they the campers of the Elevator market?"
"Pictures of the top 10 elevators, and their designers - Sealed Section" (very naughty!)
Etc
...but how is a high-capacity elevator high tech? I always assumed that being "high tech" involved overcoming some sort of engineering or scientific hurdle. A wrist computer, flying car, video cell phone, etc.
Is there any reason this thing couldn't've been built with 1950s elevator technology?If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Aren't electric motors amazing? They tell me they're going to run cars some day =)
If you're dumb enough to drive in Manhattan, you probably need a machine to park your car for you.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
... you're stuck with your Bentley in your flat, 23 stories up. All dressed up and nowhere to go.
Some of these new porker SUV's like the Hummer H2 already have a curb weight of close to 7000 lbs. Add 4 or 5 passengers and their crap and you can easily exceed that 8000lb limit. Anyone who would buy a useless contraption like an H2 is exactly in the same demographic as someone who would want an elevator for their whip.
It was right next to Oatmeal Enthusiast
err your paying 4.7M for an apartment WITH an elevator, you dumbass, not just for the elevator.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It's silly. The current standard of having a parking-garage in the basement and a private elevator up to your apartments is better in several ways:
Space high up is worth more than space in the basement, because people prefer living on the 10th floor instead of in the basement.
A private elevator that opens directly at your apartment is *less* risky than this, did you look at the floorplans ? Sure there's a garage on your floor-level, you do however need to exit that garage, and go trough the stairwell to enter your actual apartment. Said stairwell is accessible to everyone in the building. (it needs to be, for fire-security reasons)
A private elevator is *quicker*, quite simply because it doesn't need to lift 8000lbs.
So, what are you going to prefer:
Driving into the basement-garage, stop at the turner-plate, enter elevator, wait 20 seconds and be in your apartment.
Or Driving into the car-lift. Wait a minute. Driving into your garage. Exiting and locking the garage. Go trough the stairwell. Unlock and enter your apartment.
It's a no-brainer....
Raising and lowering all those cars probably would consume a lot of energy. While the address uses Con Edison, one of the most expensive utilities in the country.
However, if the elevators used regenerative braking, they wouldn't consume much energy at all. Lowering the cars could charge a battery that raises the next car. Such efficient tech could be applied to all NYC's many elevators, even at lower loads per trip, if it became cheap, reliable and maintainable. Overall the energy saved could be very large.
In the meantime, Americans will proceed to evolve to a point where we never leave our cars. We'll need the wheels just to drive around the batteries for all our mobile devices. Especially as we'll need to stay inside a generated mediasphere all the time, rather than face the ugly reality of a world we've twisted around that growing consumer lifestyle. We'll probably average a kilowatt or two consumption, undocking our personal carts from our larger cars to redock into our office cubicles.
--
make install -not war
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your point is well taken. Still, for a USD$5 tip, a dweller in such a place can skip the half-hour it would kill to pick out everything and lug it upstairs. Maybe they have something better to do.
Such a service would be a godsend if I were really sick. Back when I used a pharmacy that delivered, I tended to need them most when I was ill. My disabled mom could really use something like this.
Also, there's many a day that I'm simply not in a cheerful enough mood to subject the rest of society to my attitude. I'd be doing my neighbors a favor if I didn't come out of the apartment, taking a chance on running into that rude kid that lives down the hall, the surly teen stocker, and the annoying nosy neighbor, any one of whom might be treated to an unwanted bit of conflict when we came into contact. On those days when I'm not feeling particularly polite, I tend to stay in; I think it's the polite thing to do.
What I'm saying is that while I wouldn't use such a service very often, I can think of times when it would be appropriate. I can also think of lots of people who would make the world a better place if they'd just stay in their apartment and never come out.
I previously lived in a small hick town http://www.meridianstar.com/ that had a similar 'elevator garage'. The numbskulls in charge of city spending were sold (or bought) on the idea that three parking garages with elevator only access (for cars) was a way to eliminate parking problems downtown. Now, imagine Aunt Bee with half the soccer team going for pizza. They arrive in their typical deep south suburban, hand the car jockey the keys and walk three blocks for pizza. After filling themselves and sludging three blocks back IN THE RAIN, they find there is a line (queue) of folks waiting on THEIR suburban. Now, the estimated time of top to bottom service (oh hush) of the elevator was 6 minutes, including putting a vehicle on at either end. That means there is at the very least a 6 minute, or 12 minute wait depending on where the elevator is, and your position in line for your car. Oh, and if you forgot something (ever done that) and want to retrieve it before departing the 'garage', you STILL have to wait all that time again. Needless to say the garages were abandoned (paid for mind you) for about 15 years. Someone decided they could be retrofitted (enclosed) to store medical records and now they are gov't white elephants again. Just with the added expense of the retrofit. Note, there is no reference to the old parking garages found in their articles search. Odd, isn't it ?
Actually, it's probably a good idea to try and improve building efficiencies as much as possible. Parking on a residential floor is a costly use of square footage. In addition to a large lift you have to provide several hundred square feet for each parking spot. That could easily add up to the same square footage as several units. Which means in financial terms you aren't realizing potential revenue and in terms of efficient use of the building footprint you're not providing the same number of units for people to live in. Considering the costs and potential pollution that goes into constructing a building, not using the footprint efficiently is a decidedly "un-green" thing to do. There's a real reason why urban buildings are very different from suburban ones.
I would imagine that a more likely driving factor in this case was the site's adjacency to the water. I don't work in NYC so I don't know the geotechnical specifics of Manhatten, but if it's silty soil you're going to have a lot of water penetration which means pumps running 24/7 and limitations on how deep you can go. I would imagine the developer simply saw this issue as a justification for doing something as exorbitant and unique as having people park on their floor. More of a marketing gimmick that anything else. A green building has bike storage, public lockers and showers, and is normally situated to make using public transportation easy and practical.