What is the highest floor in the tallest building you have ever worked in?
Then tell me, what was it like?
Were you so tall you were sometimes in the clouds?
What was the view like up there? Was there any particularly interesting sight you could see? For example being able to see helicopters or airplanes flying below you or nearly at your level?
How long did the elevator ride take to get up to your floor?
Did the building ever move in high winds?
And I have to ask, after 9/11 did you ever have concerns about safety like how would you get out of such a building in case of emergency?
My sister lived on the 20th floor of a block of flats in North London. they were built on a hill.
The view was amazing - a panorama of the whole area. We were higher than the planes queuing up to land at Heathrow, which was pretty weird, and yes - sometimes we had fog, while ground level did not.
I don’t remember much about the lifts except that they stunk.
And yes - it did sway, although you had to be out on the balcony to notice.
Since this is asking for personal experiences, let’s move it to IMHO.
Urbanredneck, I have had to move several of your recent threads from General Questions to IMHO. Please pay attention to forum descriptions. If you are asking for personal experiences or opinions, start your thread in IMHO rather than GQ.
I think eight floor of the Phoenix hotel in Lexington KY. Also sixth floor in Baton Rouge, “High atop McCrory’s Five and Dime, overlooking Aucoin’s parking lot”. I think those are the only two jobs I ever had where I had to commute by elevator.
I spent a couple of weeks as a guest of a friend in Hong Kong who lived on one of the top floors of one of those high-rise mansions, maybe about the 45th floor. Amazing fvew of Hong Kong from up there. An entire city of about 15,000 people living on, ,literally, a few acres.
Reference to your fear question I had a friend in Venezuela who lived on maybe the 10th or 15th floor of an apartment building, in which all the units were accessible from an exterior walkway on each floor, via a kind of catwalk. I always walked very close to the building, staying away from the railing. I think if I lived there, I’d have lots of nightmares about being up there in open space. I once knew a guy in New Orleans who was seriously disabled when his upper balcony collapsed into the French Quarter street. Which is extremely rare, but it did happen.
From 1978 to 1982 I worked on the 84th floor of what was then The Sears Tower.
Yes, sometimes we were in the clouds. In fact, every now and then the cloud cover would be low enough that we were actually above the clouds. All that could be seen out the windows was a field of white fluff out of which rose the upper floors of the John Hancock building and what was then the Standard Oil building.
One of my coworkers worked the Saturday of the Air & Water Show. The Blue Angels ran some practice runs and buzzed the building right outside his office. He said it was pretty cool.
The building has a multiple elevator system. There are two entrances into the building, one on Franklin and one on Wacker. The Wacker entrance is up some stairs so it’s a floor above the Franklin entrance. The main bank of elevators is double decker cars that stop on Franklin, 33 and 66 or Wacker, 34 and 67. There are other elevator banks that go from these main floors to the other floors. The shafts for these elevators are shared by more than one car. To get to my office on 84, I took the elevator from Wacker to 67, then took an elevator in another bank to 84. If I had gotten on the main elevator on the Franklin level, I’d ride to 66, then take an escalator to 67 to get on the second elevator.
I was once on a main elevator that fell 20+ stories uncontrolled, but that’s another story.
The building was designed to move in high winds. If the winds were strong enough, you could see the coffee in your cup sway from one rim to another and the doors would swing on their hinges. The company I worked for had one of those sets of supply shelves that are on rails; once the winds were so strong that the shelves were “riding the rails” on their own.
The first job I ever had was on the top (56th) floor of the fabulous art deco Chanin Building in NYC. There is so much gorgeous architectural detail in that building; it was a joy to work in it. I operated an architectural blueprint machine which was situated right next to a floor-to-ceiling window, so I had a great, yet vertigo-inducing, view of midtown Manhattan. The elevators were hella fast, so the ear-popping trip up to the office was measured in seconds.
The Chanin Building is very close to the MetLife Building, which back then was called the PanAm Building, and they had a helipad on the roof. The two buildings are almost the same height, so the helicopters flew so close to our building that it actually shook at times.
And sometime in the mid-80s I was working night-shift in another tall building in NYC, when the building shook a little, like a large truck was passing by. Except we were too high up to feel the rumble of a passing truck. It turned out to be a small earthquake.
I’ve been to the observation deck on the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower (Willis Tower) a half dozen or so times. Once was just 2 months after 9/11 and I have to say we kept close watch on any visible flying objects. I recall we snapped a few pictures and said, Ok let’s get the hell down now.
I currently work on the 29th floor and have been as high as 35 in a city that goes much, much higher. My view is filled with corncobs.
While I’ve worked enveloped in fog, it’s not high enough to be working ‘above’ the cloud layer, if that’s what you mean.
The elevator is quick. Like many buildings there are banks of elevators that express to subsets of floors. I worked in a building where the elevators where ‘routed’. This worked great. By that I mean, you entered your desired floor in a keypad at the entrance and a screen directs you to an elevator number that is usually ready and waiting for you (along with 2 or 3 other riders directed there).
The highest that I’ve worked was the sixth floor of an office building in Raleigh, NC. My grandmother did once live on the 18th floor of a retirement home in Arlington, Virginia, and my mother once had a job as a secretary in the Empire State Building shortly after she arrived in the USA at age 22.
Up until last year, I spent several years working on the 40th floor of a 51-floor building in Los Angeles. I don’t specifically recall there being fog/clouds quite at our level, but not far off.
The view was great. On a clear day, from one of the corner offices, you could see most of the LA basin west all the way to the ocean. We could look down on hotel pools in the surrounding area, and one could always see how bad the freeways were before leaving in the evening. We occasionally had helicopters at or below our level when law enforcement conducted some high-profile emergency training exercises. And we had tremendous views of the space shuttle Endeavor when it was flown into town and circled around the city.
Yes, the building swayed noticeably when we had high winds, but that wasn’t incredibly frequent. More noticeable was when we had earthquakes. Some doors would swing back and forth for several minutes afterward.
As for security concerns, yes, 9/11 was on the minds of people from time-to-time. Especially since there’s a flight path for landing aircraft that has planes circling very close to downtown. But it’s unrealistic to function on a daily basis worrying about something like that.
To the OP Questions:
We were often in the clouds. The magical days were when the building poked out of the low fog, just a couple of lone buildings peeking out of an endless sea of mist.
A great view of the surrounding downtown, mountains, lakes, shipping port, etc. Air rules prohibited aircraft from flying below the level, but they sure looked like it sometimes.
Elevator ride was between 5 and 10 minutes IIRC. There was an express elevator with a transfer floor somewhere in the middle, can’t remember exactly which floor. There was also an “executive” elevator that skipped most of the floors but required a special keycard. Taking the non-express elevators at busy times, stopping at nearly every floor, could take over 30 minutes.
The building moved several feet in high winds, a noticeable slow sway like a gently rocking hammock. Made me more sleepy than it did nauseous.
For a number of years, I worked on a high floor in the Chrysler Building, just a couple of blocks away. I remember that during high winds, you could feel the sway. Nothing to worry about – a certain amount of sway is designed into tall buildings. But it was a strange sensation.
The highest floor in a buiding I’ve worked in is the 42nd floor in the HSBC building in Canary wharf, London. The work I did was 6 or 7 floors below ground level, though.
The highest I’ve actually worked is 28 floors up on the Empress State Building in Earls Court, London. The hoist up the side was just a cage, including the floor, which I found a bit disconcerting the first time I went up, but it beat the hell out of carrying my tools up 28 flights of stairs.
I think the highest floor I worked on would be the 30th floor of a 32-floor building in the financial district in Manhattan. The view of the bay was spectacular. It was very relaxing to glance out the window for a few minutes and watch the boats and stuff.
The building did sway slightly in the wind as all tall buildings do. It was not especially noticeable except on extremely windy days, which are not that common in New York.
Clouds (more like fog) did sometimes roll in from the bay underneath us. That was cool. The elevator was reasonably fast in that building, and not too crowded.