The ‘Bird Cage’ lift

Before modern elevators became sealed machines, buildings often used “birdcage lifts.”

These early elevators were elegant pieces of visible engineering — open metal lattice cages, folding gates, and exposed shafts where the mechanics of movement were part of the architecture itself.

But the beauty came with risk.

Many early lifts used a two-door system: a heavy outer landing door and a collapsible inner gate on the elevator car. Without modern electronic interlocks, dangerous gaps could exist between them.

In 2001 at the historic Bethel Inn in Maine, an 8-year-old boy stepped into the narrow space between the two doors. When the elevator was called to another floor, the moving car crushed him against the landing above. The tragedy was not an isolated incident — investigations found several similar deaths involving older elevator designs.

Events like these forced regulators and engineers to rethink elevator safety entirely.

Today every modern elevator is required to have interlocking doors, enclosed cars, redundant braking systems, and multiple safety layers.

Restoring an original birdcage lift today is extremely complex and expensive.

But when done properly, these machines remain something rare:

moving pieces of architectural history