Hey, you want to talk superstitious? The building I work in, not only doesn’t have a thirteenth floor, it doesn’t even have anything within nine floors of it! One, two, three, and then it just stops!
I actually work on the 13th floor, in room 1334.
To show others’ superstition: I once pointed out to my officemate that one of our windows was the fire window, to be knocked out if we couldn’t reach a fire escape, then jumped out of.
“But we’re on the 13th floor,” he complained.
“During a building fire is no time to be superstitious,” I replied. :rolleyes:
Yeah, but that’s not superstition, that’s just architectural weirdness. Dwinelle looks like two buildings with two different numbering schemes stuck together–there’s even a 6 inch rise in the hallway as you cross the seams (as I recall; been a while since I’ve been there).
And the word from Otis is…
…they don’t know, either. I got a very nice email from Michele Aldrich, an archivist at Otis, and she said:
She went on to say she understood the practice of omitting the 13th floor was disappearing because firefighters hate it – if they have a report of a fire on the 15th floor, they want to be able to count floors from the outside and get it right.
I also asked if Mr. Otis himself could have started the tradition, but she assured me it can’t be laid at his floor, er, door; Mr. Otis died in 1861 – about twenty years before the first skyscrapers went up.
Ms. Aldrich recommended taking our question to either the Skyscraper Museum of New York City or the Council on Tall Buildings. (She also said the Skyscraper Museum has a better sense of humor.)
Any of our New Yawkers care to take this up to the next level and drop by the SMNYC?
The North Avenue Tower of the Atlanta beverage company where I work has a thirteenth floor, but it’s not accessible from the standard employee elevators. Those elevators go “…11, 12, 14, 15…” and if climbing the stairs, you’ll go from 12 to 14 with an extra landing, but no exit door, in between them.
The service elevators are the only way to get to 13. It’s a maintenance/storage floor, near as I can tell (I was never curious enough to go onto it).