Yesterday I was among the presenters for a day-long class about the Patent Cooperation Treaty at the Detroit patent office. The audience was alert and attentive and had lots of good questions. It was a delightful day.
The hotel room that the organizers of the class booked for me had a door lever that puzzled me. As you can see in the photo at right, the door lever was vertical. I tried to figure out why it was vertical. Was my particular hotel room the only one like this? Was it simply a sloppy mistake by a worker when the hotel was built? If so, why did the mistake not get corrected during the succeeding decades? Or was it intentional that it is vertical? Can you figure it out?
This hotel is the central tower of the Renaissance Center (nicknamed “RenCen”), a massive urban-renewal project finished in 1977. The hotel, at 73 stories, was at the time the tallest hotel in the world. Even now it is the tallest building in Michigan. Several equally massive office towers surround the central tower. The world headquarters of General Motors was an anchor tenant in RenCen.
In recent years, RenCen has struggled with declining occupancy, particularly stemming from increased remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. General Motors has announced plans to move its headquarters away from RenCen in 2025, leaving the future of the complex uncertain. The most likely next step is demolition of RenCen.
We can now return to the puzzling door lever. The answer, as it turns out, is that when the hotel was built in 1977, the door lever was installed correctly. It extended rightwards.
Shortly after the hotel was placed into service, a problem arose. Burglars learned that they could insert an appropriately shaped hook of metal under the hotel room door. The burglar could then manipulate the hook upwards to engage the (horizontal) door lever to open the door. This burglary risk was addressed by reorienting the door levers in all of the guest rooms of the hotel to be vertical instead of horizontal.
It is intentional. Vertical door handles are used when a door is to be pulled open (grabbing the lever and pulling upwards is easier for pulling open). Horizontal door handles, on the other hand, are intended to be pushed open.