You couldn't pay me to go into that thing, may be safe but I have a serious fear of heights and it looks down right scary.
To get herself into the elevator every morning at a downtown high-rise tower, a friend of mine who worked on a high floor used to chant under her breath "De Nile is a River in Egypt" and then just pretend she was still working in midtown at a firm where the offices were on the 7th floor, not dozens higher.
I didn't mind working in tall office towers, although it crossed my mind once that getting out in case of fire could be a challenge and maybe impossible depending on where the fire was versus exits and stairwells. There was a relatively small fire at 120 Wall Street once, when some artist's shop down the hall from our firm had a fire in a wastebasket and a lot of flammable solvents went up. It was enough to make me learn immediately where emergency exits were at every place I worked thereafter.
The big if fairly rare problem in those high towers is electrical blackouts. Walking down 53 flights of emergency exit stairs in the Pan Am building (now Met Life) during the massive 1965 northeastern blackout was no picnic.
We made that trek about five or six hours after the NYC mayor had been saying all that time on emergency radio broadcast facilities that ConEd would have the lights back on "in about 20 minutes". Yeah right. It took us almost half an hour to walk down, and by then our knees turned to jelly when we quit moving and sat down for awhile, before starting our assorted treks on foot to get home or to a bus.
I happened to be looking out the window to the south on that strangely balmy November evening when the power failure began. The lights suddenly went out all over the city, in a quickly vanishing wave and fade to black. A shocking sight!
My boss was facing the other way, packing his briefcase, asking me where this or that was, preparing to take a few days off work to deal with a child in the hospital. When the office went dark he just laughed and made some joke like "this building, wow, can't even plug in a copy machine and a coffeepot at the same time."
Looking down at the pale wash of taxi headlights in the rush hour on an otherwise totally darkened Park Avenue, I said "Yeah I think this is bigger than that...."
He was about 35 years old then, I think. He and another partner at the firm, on a dare to each other, went down 53 flights and across the road to a pizza place and managed to score a bunch of still warm pizzas and a bushel basket of sodas and carried all that stuff back up 53 flights to share with us. "Only the young and crazy"...
www.cnn.com
