There are no windows in five high-speed elevators at the new One World Trade Center, but the view may still make a few passengers dizzy: a 500-year CGI timelapse of New York as the elevator journeys upward at 23mph.
Elevators traveling to the observatory of the tower are walled with large high-definition monitors made to look like windows, which for the 47-second ride show a panorama of the city as it has changed over the centuries. The first video of the elevators was reported by the New York Times.
Ascending at more than 10m (33ft) per second to 1,268ft above the sidewalk, the elevators offer a historical theme park ride.
The ride begins in 1500, as the elevator rises out of the rock and swampy waters that lay off Manhattan before humans decided to extend the island; a small village lines the river, before the Dutch arrive to turn it into New Amsterdam. In the 1600s, homes of colonists start materializing on the island’s meadows. In the 1700s, the shoreline creeps farther south as the city transforms into colonial New York, and masted cargo ships dot its expanding docks.
By 1839, passengers can see the tidal strait known as the East river; later they can see the Brooklyn bridge. Towers start to dot the skyline. A century later the Manhattan bridge is in sight and architectural behemoths have taken over the landscape. For a few seconds in the late 20th century, the south tower of the original World Trade Center looms alongside the ascending elevator.
The south tower fades out of existence as the elevator’s chronological ticker strikes 2001.
The video is not so detailed as to show construction; buildings gauzily appear and disappear instead. Finally, steel beams and structural supports of the new tower spindle outward into existence, and the building appears to coalesce around the elevator just in time for arrival on the 102nd floor.
While the south tower appears in the video from 1973 to 2001, the video is not entirely historically accurate. This is probably to allow it to include several landmarks – the Park Row Building and the Singer Building, for instance – that would otherwise have been obscured by the time they were actually opened.
The observatory itself comprises three levels of the tower and will open, with an entrance fee, on 29 May.
The Trade Center officials who decided to line the elevators with monitors that mimic glass are not alone in their ambitions to alarm tourists prey to fear of heights. A British developer announced plans last year to line the interior of commercial aircraft with full-length screens, showing the view outside.
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