Elevators have evolved over the past few hundred years. Most people are used to the look of the standard elevator: handrails, buttons, floor indicators and a sliding door. Apart from paternoster elevators, elevators with no buttons or doors continuously running in a loop, elevators have doors that secure the passenger safely inside. One elevator in Erie, Pennsylvania, however, gives its passengers three times the security they need.
Cobb’s Second Time Around Thrift Shop on Parade Street holds some interesting things inside. Erie News Now special news reporter John Last of The Last Word reports that nearly anything can be bought at the store, but the most interesting item cannot be purchased. The store houses a unique three-door elevator, making it unlike any elevator seen around town. To get inside the elevator, you must first slide the entrance door open. Once inside the elevator, passengers are greeted with the first-floor exit door directly across from the elevator’s entrance door which leads to the loading dock. To the right of the entrance door is the exit, which leads to the second- and third- floor shopping areas. Visitors of the store are accompanied by an employee whenever the elevator is used because of how different the elevator is.
According to an inspector at Green Elevator Inspection of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, in all his 37 years of work this is the only elevator he has ever seen with three doors. He tells Erie News Today that 90% of all elevators in the U.S. have one door, with nearly all the remaining 10% having two doors. He continues that the elevator, manufactured by Otis, was likely built in the 1940s, and there are older elevators in the town that don’t have three doors like this one, calling the elevator an “oddity.”
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