When you live in a 26-story building, elevators are a fact of life.
Residents of Penn's three high rises know this all too well. For years, as the now-three-decade-old towers have deteriorated and crumbled, they have endured absurd waits during high-traffic hours and suffered when one or more -- and sometimes all four -- of the elevators in each high rise has been out of service.
Yet in spite of recent renovations to elevators in all three buildings -- seven years ago in Harrison and Harnwell and this summer's upgrade of two in Hamilton College House -- problems continue seemingly unabated.
And though the dozen elevators in question play a vital role in the lives of more than 2,200 College House residents, the University seems content to do nothing, arguing that the elevators were recently overhauled and are repaired when necessary.
This lackadaisical attitude is unacceptable. Malfunctioning elevators are more than mere inconvenience -- as though this alone is not enough justification for substantial work. They are dangerous. A piecemeal, "fix-on-failure" approach is not enough.
Nor is the administration's claim of ignorance terribly believable. Regardless of the number of formal complaints lodged with Housing Services, the unreliability of the elevators is legendary -- and it's not just students who are affected. Faculty residents and Housing staff, among others, are intimately familiar with the elevators' many failings.
Even the new elevators in place in Hamilton are not exempt from the criticism -- they, too, have been plagued by breakdowns and inconsistency. Still, no major action has been taken, nor is any planned.
There is nothing remarkable about the high rise elevators -- not the amount of usage each receives or the "vandalism" cited by the company charged with maintaining them -- except how often they are put out of service. The only constant is unreliability. And it is time for the complaints to be taken seriously.
