Friday, February 6, 2009

Cool Elevators


In 1976, a new vertical retail mall, Water Tower Place, opened on North Michigan Avenue which coincided with my freshman year at a suburban college in the Chicago area. Growing up in Springfield, Illinois, I was very familiar with horizontal malls, but with not with vertical ones. And certainly not with a vertical mall that had glass elevators in the middle of the building.

People stood in lines and waited for the opportunity to see the eight floors of shops from the inside of the elevator. Sounds sort of silly today, but the bank of elevators shown here was a tourist attraction when the mall first opened. And I confess to being one of those who waited and waited.

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