After enduring months of elevators that lurch precariously, stop between floors and often cease functioning altogether, some residents of Sansom Place feel they are getting the shaft.
"They're terrible," first-year law student Derek Santos said yesterday of the elevators in Sansom Place East. "I'm paying about $510 a month for a very, very tiny room and on top of that, two, three days a week I have to climb 16 flights of stairs."
A Facilities and Real Estate Services employee who asked that his name not be used said that there are currently no plans to renovate the graduate tower elevators, though regular maintenance is performed.
"Like the other residential elevators, they take a lot of use [so we] adjusted the maintenance," the employee said. We are "performing the same maintenance at an accelerated pace."
Along with regular maintenance, the elevators undergo special safety tests every five years. The car is loaded with 125 percent of its weight capacity and then brought to a quick stop.
According to the Facilities employee, the Sansom Place elevators did just fine on the most recent mechanical test.
But the regular maintenance does not seem to be making much of a difference to the residents of the towers. According to several residents, the elevators are in extremely poor condition and have been for some time now.
Students had a litany of complaints about the three elevators in each building.
"They keep jumping up and down," first-year law masters' student Pragni Kapadia said of the Sansom East elevators. "They're not working. And the air conditioning [in the elevators] isn't working."
First-year Fine Arts student Juliet Geldi said she knew of someone who had a Sansom East elevator experience that was somewhat more harrowing.
"One of my friends got stuck... for an hour, and he had a [class] presentation," Geldi said.
And a resident of Sansom Place West said sometimes the elevators in that tower stop between floors -- but that was not even his major complaint.
"One of the elevators usually never works," Engineering senior Akshay Davis said. "Three times this semester, only one elevator has been working."
And Santos said that when an elevator is out of order, residents do not always know it.
"Sometimes they don't put the signs up, so you're waiting," he said. "It's pretty outrageous."
Wharton junior Wojciech Hajduczyk said the frequently broken-down elevators in Sansom West are beginning to remind him of another set of notoriously bad campus elevators.
"It's starting to get like the high rises," he said.
But the elevators in Hamilton College House, which are arguably the most temperamental of all the elevators in the three high rise undergraduate dormitories, will be renovated this summer and next.
Sansom Place residents, on the other hand, may have to keep on waiting -- or walking.
"They never work.... The only reason I'm taking the elevator now is because it's so hot," College senior Glen Andrews said of the Sansom West elevators. "I'm so sick of waiting, I usually just walk the six flights."
