Elevator traffic analysis youtube
Other memories are more positive: In a country where most still live with their parents and public intimacy is out of the question, young Egyptian couples have been known to use elevators to kiss. Maybe they have heard the horror stories - whether wild Egyptian weasels falling atop people inside, or heads being poked into iron shafts at a fatally wrong moment - or maybe they have their own. Understandably, some Cairenes stick to the stairs. “When people come into the building, they feel like they’re stepping back in time.”Īnother feeling people tend to associate with such elevators is that of holding their breath every time one of them lurches upward - not with the isolation-tank noiselessness of a modern elevator but with little vibrations, along with minor bounces at departure and arrival, that make it hard not to think about the mechanics of the whole operation. “It’s a masterpiece,” said Mahmoud Rashad, 37, a doorman and the proud keeper of the elevator in his building in Zamalek, an old-money district with many antique lifts to set a connoisseur’s heart aflutter. Mirrors are common, petite leather built-in benches a pleasant surprise. The classic old elevator rises through an open shaft in a building’s center, an elaborately wrought metal cage separating it from well-worn marble stairs that wrap around it in a helix all the way up. Other owners lack the means or the will to replace them, thanks in part to a so-called old rent system that governs about a quarter of all Cairo rentals, allowing tenants to pay next to nothing - an average of about $3 per month - for years on end. Some elevators’ survival owes to their beauty, landlords prizing them as lobby centerpieces. “The fact that they’re still working until now,” said Mohamed Hassan, the head engineer at Al-Ismaelia, a developer that rehabilitates aging buildings in downtown Cairo, “it’s a miracle.” Though some elevators have been replaced with modern machines, dozens, if not hundreds - no precise census exists - have been going up and down the same buildings for decades, in some cases more than a century.
Much the same goes for the city’s antiquated elevators, graceful fin-de-siècle and Art Deco pieces from the era when European architects molded Cairo’s streets, cosmopolitans filled its cafes and the city competed with London and Paris for wealth and glamour. In central Cairo, few things are thrown away for good: Consider the ancient monuments and tombs built from the cannibalized parts of even more ancient precursors, or the doddering chairs, patched up with prosthetic limbs, where doormen sit on nearly every sidewalk. The residents failed to organize maintenance until it stopped working entirely even once fixed, it would descend only as far as the second floor.īut the building was conveniently located. Partly it was her phobia of antique elevators, with their cabs of gleaming wood and glass suspended from very visible cables in rib cages of metal grillwork and partly it was the specimen in her apartment building: It went up, but refused to go down without some control-box fiddling. Mohamed, 28, surrendered to an elevator’s whims more often than necessary for most inhabitants of the 21st century.
Over a few months living downtown earlier this year, Ms. Hager Mohamed was willing to brave the first two. CAIRO - When you live in downtown Cairo, a neighborhood of European-meets-Egyptian facades in various states of faded grandeur, roundabouts whizzing with traffic and storefronts patchworked in riotously mismatched signage, it helps to cultivate a certain tolerance for features like relentless honking, rundown real estate and geriatric elevators.