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Interesting Uses for Elevators

“Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.”

Nick Paumgarten, from “Up and then down; the lives of elevators” [newyorker.com] in the April 21 2008 issue of the New Yorker