The Accidental Music of Imperfect Escalators

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
This is the first joke I ever really noticed as a design joke.

Mitch Hedberg:
I like an escalator, man. Because an escalator can never break. It can only become stairs.

[LAUGHTER, FOLLOWED BY APPLAUSE]

Roman Mars:
That’s Mitch Hedberg.

Mitch Hedberg:
There would never be an “Escalator temporarily out of order.” sign. Only an “Escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.”

Roman Mars:
Being designed to elegantly deal with the extreme failure case is probably an underappreciated design element. But it really is one of the things that makes an escalator great. Worst case, they’re stairs. See how far you get in a broken elevator.

Sam Greenspan:
“I bet everyone wants escalators. Enjoying that design aspect, too. And we’re getting our cardio!”

Roman Mars:
That’s 99% Invisible’s own Sam Greenspan, walking up an escalator in a Metro station in DC.

Roman Mars:
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, when it became possible for products to be designed just once and then mass-produced, it has been the slight failures and imperfections and the individual wear and tear introduced by human use that transforms a quality mass-produced product into a thing we actually love. Your worn-in blue jeans. Your grandmother’s iron skillet. The initial design determined its quality. But it’s their post-manufacturing imperfections that make them comfortable and make them loveable, that makes them yours. And if you think that a slightly broken escalator can’t be loveable, well maybe you haven’t been paying attention.

Sam Greenspan:
An escalator on a DC Metro platform is like a fine wine. It’s better with age and without any industrial lubricant.

Roman Mars:
Sam lives in Baltimore now. But he lived in DC for a few years. He said that this sound came to embody the excitement he felt from living in a city.

[SOUND OF SQUEAKY ESCALATOR]

Sam Greenspan:
Yeah, I mean I grew up in one of Florida’s most depressing suburbs. It’s just miles and miles of highways and culs-de-sac.

Roman Mars:
Very nice.

Sam Greenspan:
Thank you! So when I moved to DC, I took public transit everywhere, just because I could. The DC metro system — it’s not the best in the world, but it’s pretty good. Although a lot of people do lament the poor condition of the Metro’s escalators. Some are just flat-out broken and then there are some that work but make these crazy noises. Which, you know, annoy a lot of people, but for me, I found that a skronking escalator was like this little trumpeter announcing how awesome it was to live in the city.

Roman Mars:
It turns out that someone else loves this sound too.

Sam Greenspan:
So this is Chris Richards.

Chris Richards:
I’m the pop music critic at “The Washington Post.”

Roman Mars:
Chris was also in a band called “Q and Not U.” He wrote a kind of appreciation of the Metro escalators for the Post.

Chris Richards:
We’re at the Farragut North Metro Station in Washington, DC on the north side of L Street and Connecticut Avenue.

Sam Greenspan:
Chris told me that he had never really noticed the sound that the escalators made, until one day when he was on a bit of free jazz kick.

Chris Richards:
Having my ear trained for those sort of breath on brass kind of sounds, I think maybe turning the corner to come down the escalators one day, I thought, “Oh, there’s a saxophone player playing at the bottom of the metro.” But it wasn’t that at all. It was just the escalators kind of like wonking and screeching away. I don’t know if they were always this loud.

Sam Greenspan:
On the escalator, there’s a plastic element on the side of each step that keeps it from rubbing against the metal siding. A lubricant keeps it all running smoothly. But when it rains or snows, the lubrication wears off.

Chris Richards:
So what you’re hearing when you hear this kind of like moaning, squawks is the steel stairs sort of rubbing up and chaffing against that plastic element when it’s gotten a little too dry. Kind of like a beautiful, serendipitous aftershock of the wear and tear that these escalators are facing. It sounds like music!

Sam Greenspan:
And, like any good music critic, Chris started classifying the different styles of Metro escalator. So here at Farragut North, the escalators might sound like…

Chris Richards:
Whales mating (laughs) or something like that.

Sam Greenspan:
Whereas the escalator at U Street…

Chris Richards:
Kind of sounded like Indian drone music.

Sam Greenspan:
And at Columbia Heights…

Chris Richards:
An aviary of chrome-throated ravens taunting you as you descend into your workday.

Roman Mars:
We understand that we could be over-romanticizing a skronking and squeaking escalator.

Sam Greenspan:
You can talk all day about appreciating the ambient soundscape around you and get really into aestheticized ways of listening — Chris Richards was into this, by the way — but you could also just as easily say, you know, “Hey, this is all noise.”

Chris Richards:
I think it’s all really in the ear of the beholder.

Sam Greenspan:
It is totally understandable that people wouldn’t appreciate a screeching escalator. Chris actually told me that when he called up Metro for his story, their PR people didn’t believe him. They thought he was writing some big expose about escalator failure.

Chris Richards:
Quite the opposite, really. I was trying to say, you know, even though these things are a little bit beat down, this is a wonderful little residual bonus, I guess.

Sam Greenspan:
My point of view is if you’re going to be subjected to some kind of sensory experience, of which you have no control, every single day, then it’s to your benefit. You know, why not try to enjoy something. Because there are enough things in life to be stressed out about.

Chris Richards:
As much as people complain about all the sounds that cities make and all the noises that cities make, I think those noises define it and, you know, really become our environment. Sound can be an irritation or it can be information.

Sam Greenspan:
Chris got me hoping the escalators never get fixed. Except for the ones that just straight up don’t work. The escalator at the Wheaton stop? It is the longest escalator in the Western Hemisphere! It takes three minutes to ride to the top when it’s working!

Roman Mars:
Let’s hope that the Wheaton escalator doesn’t conveniently become stairs anytime soon.

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by our intern Sam Greenspan and me, Roman Mars. It was adapted from an episode of Sam’s podcast “Whisper Cities,” a show about overlooked places and the people who find them. Find out more at whispercities.org. This program is made possible with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It’s a project of KALW 91.7, local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. 99% Invisible is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, making public radio more public. Find out more at prx.org.

To find out more or keep in touch with us, especially if you want to tell us about your favorite sound which you know – which you know for a fact – is somebody else’s noise, go to our website. It’s 99percentinvisible.org.