Old elevator will give Oregon owners a lift

An Oregon couple who collect old engines and machines — the bigger, the better — will become the new owners of an antique Otis elevator so unwieldy its West Seattle owners had a hard time giving it away.

The Lanzarottas have taken in orphaned objects before.

"We just purchased a DROTT crane," Melanie Lanzarotta said of equipment mounted on the family's pickup for acquisitions such as the elevator. "We need it."

Weighing several thousand pounds, the four-story elevator, its engine and machinery have sat unused for more than a decade in a sealed-off shaft at Providence Mount St. Vincent, an assisted-living facility in West Seattle.

The staff there needed the storage space the circa-1924 elevator occupied but couldn't fathom throwing out the elevator, one of the first 1,000 in Seattle. They offered it to local history groups and museums, which politely declined the mammoth "gift."

After an article about the elevator appeared in The Seattle Times on March 31, St. Vincent's staff fielded a dozen queries: One came from a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, another from a Fremont bakery interested in working antiques.

In the end, the best offer came from the Lanzarottas of Leaburg, Ore., who offered not just to disassemble the equipment and truck it to Portland, but to show it at the Western Antique Powerland Museum, a 62-acre display area for old engines, trolleys and the like in nearby Brooks, Ore.

The annual summertime show draws as many as 20,000 die-hard tinkering types and their families, who see old machines not as unwanted castoffs but as antiques to behold.

Phil Lanzarotta is a general contractor who belongs to a group of steam-engine enthusiasts and is a former show manager for Western Antique Powerland. He has been collecting Otis pieces — levers, dials and ornate push-button plates — for quite some time. "Anything old kind of catches my eye," he said.

"He can do a lot of things," said Harold Pruett of Portland, a board member of the Antique Power Museum Association, which operates Powerland. "He's part millwright, part electrician, part mechanic — he's a jack of all trades."

The same love of objects with a past goes for his wife, Melanie Lanzarotta, who cooks on a gas stove from 1935.

She learned of the elevator by reading the story online. "I waited until he got home and showed it to him, and said, 'Can we?' "

The Lanzarottas were particularly excited about the Otis elevator because the company is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. Phil Lanzarotta is eager to show his antique-machinist friends how the elevator ran in the old days. Once the show is finished, he hopes to install the elevator in a log cabin he and his wife are planning to build.

"If it's old, it's neat, as far as I'm concerned," he said.

Sarah Anne Wright: 206-464-2752

Information in this article, originally published April 12, was corrected April 13. Phil and Melanie Lanzarotta of Leaburg, Ore., recently purchased a DROTT crane — a heavy-duty crane used to move items weighing several tons — not a drop crane, as was reported in a previous version of this article. Also, the crane they have mounted on their truck is a small truck crane.