Celebrating an Elevator’s Next Hundred Years

reverge-anselmo-elevator-fi

By Bill Slocum
Contributing Editor

Posing along the grand staircase of Reverge Anselmo’s home a group from the University of Connecticut including adjunct engineering professor Tom Mealy; engineering students Dave Nelson, Monica Duva, and Simon Moore; and the head of Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Program, Vito Moreno. (photo by John Ferris Robben)
Posing along the grand staircase of Reverge Anselmo’s home a group from the University of Connecticut including adjunct engineering professor Tom Mealy; engineering students Dave Nelson, Monica Duva, and Simon Moore; and the head of Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Program, Vito Moreno. (photo by John Ferris Robben)

What started over a year ago with a greasy spark and a loud clang concluded last weekend with an outdoor soirée complete with catered food and drink, poolside jazz, and Brazilian samba dancers sinuously gyrating under the stars of a cool spring night.

It all began in March, 2015, when the elevator motor in Reverge Anselmo’s midcountry home suddenly conked out. How to get it running again without opening a Pandora’s Box of building-code issues?

“Right now, the elevator pre-dates code, but if anything changes, the code applies,” Anselmo noted. “The elevator shaft is the throat of this entire house. The entire middle of the house might have had to have been torn out and gutted if I had to have a new elevator installed.”

That would have been a problem for any house, but especially his. Modeled on a famous French château, Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon, it was built in 1908 by an heir to the Goodyear Tires fortune and stands today as one of Greenwich’s last Great Estates, a masterpiece of balanced proportion inside and out.

From its parquet floors to its 16-foot-high ceilings to the vintage pipe organ a few yards from the elevator on the other side of a winding marble staircase in the front hall, the house provides ample testament to its owner’s fierce devotion to aesthetics.

“To me, it’s important that the house remains timeless,” Anselmo said. “There is no time factor here.”

Getting the elevator back in working order would be no easy task. The company that made the original elevator had stopped returning calls about 1959. Anselmo reached out to two mechanical contractors to repair the 95-pound, three-quarter-horsepower motor. Neither wanted any part of the project.

If only he could get the motor working again, his problem would be solved without incurring the wrath of a code inspector. But as time passed, it appeared more and more to be the kind of if that would have flummoxed MacGyver. With nowhere else to go, Anselmo turned to three engineering undergraduates from the University of Connecticut: Monica Duva, Simon Moore, and Dave Nelson.

The trio, guided by adjunct professor Tom Mealy and the head of UConn’s Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Program, Vito Moreno, spent most of a year on the problem as part of their senior-year coursework.

According to Moreno, the Senior Design Program takes on dozens of projects, often for bigtime corporations like General Electric and United Technologies. Even the U.S. Army has been a client. Anselmo’s reclamation project represented new territory, and the kind of challenge one doesn’t find in a textbook.

“We didn’t know the cause and effect,” Mealy noted.

Anselmo expected to pay as much as a couple million to get his beloved elevator restored to working order. But the standard fee for all clients of the Senior Design Program is $10,000. “I can’t guarantee we’ll solve the problem,” Moreno told Anselmo at the outset. “I can guarantee you we’ll work really hard on it.”

That was good enough for Anselmo. Years ago, a building-code problem came up with a ranch house he owned in California, and Anselmo found himself adrift in a seven-year tort-law limbo. The experience resulted in his eventually leaving California and impressed upon him a sharp lesson: “You don’t trifle with code.”

He told Moreno if his kids could revive his dead motor without code issues, he would reward them with a party at his house. He even promised samba dancers.

Week after week, Mealy’s students examined diagrams of phenolic plates and spring-loading mechanisms, trying to reverse-engineer the inner workings of a motor built by people who had likely passed on long before their grandparents had even met one another.

“You really came to appreciate the craftsmanship involved in older engineering designs working on this,” Nelson said. “To think it was done 100 years ago, without computers, is unbelievable.”

At right, the elevator party took place under a large tented enclosure just outside the front entrance to Mr. Anselmo’s home. (photo by John Ferris Robben)
At right, the elevator party took place under a large tented enclosure just outside the front entrance to Mr. Anselmo’s home. (photo by John Ferris Robben)

Their challenge deepened after an internet search for the original equipment diagrams came up empty. It was clear something in the motor had burned out. How deep did the problem go? Anselmo was clear in his direction: Keep the original parts wherever possible. He didn’t want to risk any code issues by adding new features to the original machine. The question was would the engine work again without a complete rehab.

“We met twice a week, talking out fabrication, the design work, risk management,” Duva recalled. “We just laid it all out.”

As Moore recalled, a critical breakthrough came when the trio happened upon the inspired solution of replacing the motor’s burnt-out starter relays with car-engine ignition points. “They were smaller and better functioning than the original equipment,” he said. “We determined that most of the motor was good, it was the antique relay mechanism that was at fault.”

The refitted, but still largely original engine was brought back to the Anselmo house in March. As Nelson recalled, the elevator ran on the first try.

It hasn’t stopped running since. For Anselmo, the result not only saved him money, but made his elevator work better than ever.

“Before, when it ran, you could hear it rattle throughout the house,” he said. “It’s quieter now. It’s a better elevator because it’s resurrected. It survived its natural death point and now it’s ready to run another hundred years.”

To celebrate, Anselmo decided to host a ribbon-cutting ceremony with the students, Moreno, and Mealy as guests of honor. Last weekend, it all came together as he threw a party with over a hundred guests, including family, friends, neighbors, even some of Anselmo’s old service buddies from the U.S. Marine Corps.

Anselmo even hired the promised samba dancers, smooth-limbed women who wore exquisite feathered headdresses they made themselves and very little else.

For him, it was another small victory to celebrate against Father Time, in the house his family has owned since 1967 and where only one other tenant, original owner Laura Robinson, has lived since its construction.

“She died in this house, and someday I will, too,” Anselmo said.

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