Big piece of Seattle history finds no takers

Museums and history groups are politely declining the offer of a free gift — an old Otis elevator, its engine and machinery, weighing in at several thousand pounds.

"It's just huge, but it doesn't really match our collection mandate," said Feliks Banel, spokesman for the Museum of History & Industry, which looks for relics with strong Northwest ties.

Other groups, including HistoryLink and the Washington State Historical Society, don't seem interested either.

"I would hate for it to go into a landfill," said Daneen Calvin, director of annual giving at Providence Mount St. Vincent, an assisted-living facility in West Seattle that's trying to find a group or person who will see the circa-1924 elevator not as a white elephant, but as a piece — however unwieldy — of Seattle's past.

The St. Vincent's staff would like the elevator to go to a place where it would be displayed — or better still, used — though it's been more than a decade since the contraption's 8.5-horsepower engine was actually fired up.

Back when it was in service, "we knew how to push the buttons and stop it between floors," said Kathleen McKenzie, the home's admissions coordinator, who also worked at St. Vincent many years ago, when she was 17. "It used to get stuck all the time."

The elevator was taken out of service for a time in the early 1970s and for good in 1989. The home has seven other elevators to use in its place.

It's unclear why it was mothballed, but Bill Watson, chief elevator inspector at Seattle's Department of Construction and Land Use (DCLU), said it was likely expensive to maintain. DCLU elevator records show the four-story elevator, numbered 998, was probably one of the first 1,000 in Seattle. It features automatic push-buttons and an enclosed car that once traveled 100 feet per minute.

"In those days, Otis was the best elevator around," said Watson.

Working elevators of this vintage are hard to find.

"It's getting more unique these days," said Watson, whose inspectors examine some 6,000 elevators and escalators annually in the city.

It used to be that elevators moved only freight; they were considered too risky for people. But in 1853, Yonkers inventor Elisha Otis designed a brake that held an elevator car if its cable snapped. By the 1880s, elevators were carrying passengers and were a common feature in buildings.

New safety regulations that require telephones in elevator cars and gates and doors that won't open between floors are making older elevators extinct. Sensors now can land an elevator car within a sliver of its landing floor, and adjust elevator pull based on the weight of passengers or load.

Calvin is not interested in making money on a transaction, and has toyed with putting the old Otis on e-Bay for a nominal price.

"I have a hard time letting go of old things."

Sarah Anne Wright: 206-464-2752 or swright@seattletimes.com