How the elevator changed everything  A book review of “Lifted: A
Cultural History of the Elevator” by Andreas Bernard   By
Andreas Bernard  There are a lot of candidates for the inanimate
icon of modernity—the one object to symbolize the sea change in
Western life between about 1870 and the Depression—the car, the
airplane, the machine gun, even the flush toilet. Bernard makes
a compelling case for the elevator.  Before its widespread use,
most buildings were capped at six or seven storeys, and their
layouts varied widely between floors. Most striking, the wealthy
once lived close to the ground, while the poor lived high, in
starving-artist garrets. To metaphorically go down the social
ladder was, literally, to ascend a building’s stairway: the
struggling protagonist in Joseph Brod’s novel Hotel Savoy
(1924), already reduced to the undesirable sixth floor of a
provincial Polish hotel, wonders ironically, “How high can I
fall?” The elevator reversed that pattern in the blink of a
cultural eye, bringing the hig