Their website doesn’t have a lot of detail. It does they’re planning for “a multipurpose community enterprise housing businesses, offices, shops, a day care, a seniors’ center, an interpretive museum, and a restaurant.” Without denying the ambitiousness of the project described, I must say that I am a little disappointed. As noted in the earlier post, I’m interested in new uses that really take advantage of the elevator architecture functionally. Other than the possibility of having the restaurant at the top, there doesn’t seem to be much of that here.

Of course, now that I’ve thought about the climbing facility idea more I’m beginning to wonder if it’s as structurally feasible as I thought. If I wasn’t so allergic to grain dust I’d probably try and get a tour inside an elevator to find out.

The ideas that I’ve heard include turning them into museums or putting a restaurants up top. The museum one is obvious, and it has happened (at least in Inglis). I don’t know if any of the restaurant proposals have actually happened.

There’s one idea that’s been clunking around in my head for a while, but I’ve not yet seen it mentioned anywhere else. I think an elevator would make a great rock climbing facility. A lot of climbing walls are put into normal sized buildings, which means they aren’t very tall or explorable like a real rock face would be. But, an elevator would allow the creation of some truly awesome walls both inside and out.

The really interesting part is that on the inside, in addition to being all-season and all-weather, it might be possible to make the walls easily movable. Most of the climbing walls I’ve seen (an admittedly small quantity) are static except for the movable holds, but I think it would be cool if you could also move the wall portions. I think the structure of an elevator lends itself to that kind of reconfiguration because there are so many different ways to build supports.

(Note to self: Google this.)