Before the invention of the elevator, buildings were more naturally mixed-use: shops (and stables?) on the ground floor, posh tenants on the first, all the way up to artists and baristas in their garrets under the roof.
By democratising travel within a building, ironically the elevator made it possible to have neighbourhoods for which service workers had to commute primarily from the outside along the x and y axes, not merely within the neighbourhood along the z.
> all the way up to artists and baristas in their garrets under the roof.
I don't think there was any significant crossover between lifts not existing and _baristas_ existing. For a start, lifts predate proper espresso machines.
Good point; please substitute the appropriate word for the service worker who doles out glasses of wine from behind a zinc counter. (or did zinc also postdate lifts?)
Zinc counters feel very much an early 20th century thing to me. Like, I'm sure they had zinc in the 19th century, but it's hard to imagine that bars were made out of it.
Apparently the bars (les zincs) did exist in the XIX, but were mostly shiny and not necessarily zinc-plated. (more that zinc, like AI now, was the cool thing then)
> L'utilisation du zinc pour le zincage du fer ... a permis l'essor de l'architecture de fer, ainsi les halles centrales de Paris, le palais de l'industrie, les nombreux théâtres et gares monumentales de chemin de fer entre 1860 et 1880.
> Dans les années 1873 à 1876, les écrivains français consignant l'expression populaire, aussi bien Zola que Huysmans, nomment zinc la surface propre des bars anglais ou le revêtement brillant des comptoirs souvent étamés ou cuivrés, plus rarement zingués.
... which puts them, if preceding, nearly contemporaneous with elevators. (but copper bartops must have been a thing earlier?)
this makes zero sense, plenty of cities with housing built mostly after the invention of the elevator that have mixed use neighborhoods with tall, low and medium height buildings alike
Yes, and those cities also presumably don't have the problem of segregated neighbourhoods. (also those cities don't tend to occur in my Old Country, but perhaps they've made progress there since I've been gone? Protip: never attempt to live in a "city" which is younger than you are. Survivre plutôt que vivre)
All I was claiming is that the elevator is necessary but not sufficient: monocultural neighbourhoods were much less likely to arise back when number of flights of stairs put a significant natural gradient on the price point of each buildable unit.
By democratising travel within a building, ironically the elevator made it possible to have neighbourhoods for which service workers had to commute primarily from the outside along the x and y axes, not merely within the neighbourhood along the z.