Chronicle No. 31 · Innovations

Eno's Folly and the Machine That Made the Top Floor Worth Paying For

In 1859 a New York hotel installed a steam-driven screw to carry guests upstairs, and inverted the value of every room above the second floor.

For as long as buildings had stairs, the best rooms sat near the ground. Climbing was for servants, and the attic was where you put the luggage.

The Fifth Avenue Hotel opened on 23 August 1859 at Madison Square. Its builder, Amos Eno, had spent about $2 million on a site so far from the city's commercial centre that New Yorkers nicknamed it Eno's Folly.

Inside was the answer to the stairs. The Boston engineer Otis Tufts had built a vertical screw railway, the first passenger elevator installed in an American hotel. A stationary steam engine turned an iron screw roughly ninety feet tall and eighteen inches thick, running up the middle of a shaft that pierced every floor. The passenger car, fitted with benches, was effectively the nut travelling along it. It carried around a dozen people and rose at about 100 feet a minute: stately rather than swift.

Tens of thousands came simply to look at it. The future Edward VII stopped by during his 1860 visit to New York, and a correspondent for The Times of London judged the hotel "a larger and more handsome building than Buckingham Palace".

Tufts's screw was soon superseded by cable machinery, and Eno's Folly turned out to earn a quarter of a million dollars a year. But the lasting change was the one nobody advertised. Once guests could be lifted, height stopped being a punishment and became a view. Attics turned into suites, roofs turned into terraces, and within two generations the top floor was the most expensive address in the building.

The elevator did not merely move people. It quietly rewrote the rate card.

“a larger and more handsome building than Buckingham Palace”

Lesson: Solve the friction and the market re-prices everything behind it: infrastructure decides what guests are willing to value.