Mobility Elevator and Lift Company’s work at Ground Zero has garnered ELEVATOR WORLD magazine's 2004 Project of the Year Award, taking First Place in the category of Accessibility Systems.

Mobility Elevator and Lift Company’s work at Ground Zero has garnered ELEVATOR WORLD magazine's 2004 Project of the Year Award, taking First Place in the category of Accessibility Systems. The project is featured in the January 2004 issue of ELEVATOR WORLD.

After the World Trade Center disaster, Battery Park City was cut off from Ground Zero and from the financial district, where many of the development’s residents were employed. To get pedestrian traffic moving once again, modifications were required at the Liberty Street pedestrian bridge which had gone directly to the World Trade Center, and the Rector Place pedestrian bridge two blocks south. Mobility Elevator and Lift was contracted to resolve the accessibility issues at both locations.

With only 10 weeks to design, manufacture and install the projects, and space constraints a problem, full passenger elevators were not feasible. Mobility recommended custom-designed vertical wheel chair lifts with their own self-contained enclosures, ventilation systems, landing doors, interlocks and cover domes to meet New York City local law 58, which amends ANSI codes and allows vertical wheelchair lifts to travel up to 25 feet. The total vertical rise at Liberty Street was 25 feet, while Rector Place was 23 feet. Mobility contacted Savaria Industries in Montreal to manufacture the Liberty Street unit, where it was assembled and tested, then broken own and delivered to the site. The lift’s plexiglass and aluminum enclosures needed to be designed to be self supporting, as the only supports for the lift was a steel frame structure built behind the machine tower. Mobility took special care to make sure this steel structure was beyond adequate, and all loads including wind resistance were taken into account. The total height of the lift enclosure exceeded 34 feet. The drive mechanism was chain hydraulic, and due to the amount of travel, a special auxiliary oil tank was designed to accommodate the hydraulic fluid.

“The sense of camaraderie that was at the site is impossible to describe, from the police officers and fire fighters to all the different trades at the site, everyone worked with an incredible sense of purpose,” Kamran Shushtarian, Mobility’s Vice President, said.

From the monumental to the mundane, Mobility answers the accessibility needs of clients as exacting as Madison Square Garden, Rockefeller Center, Lincoln Center and Trump International, as well as luxury homes, neighborhood schools, courthouses, churches and other public buildings.

Renowned for their state-of-the-art selection, installation, maintenance and 24-hour service, Mobility specializes in residential and limited-use elevators and vertical and incline wheelchair lifts tailored to a virtually limitless array of applications and specifications. For more information, call Mobility Elevator & Lift Co. at 800-441-4181 or visit their web site at www.mobilityelevator.com.