The Ups and Downs of the Jack Singer Lobby Escalators

At nearly 40 years old, the Jack Singer Concert Hall escalators have done more than their fair share of work. Operating well over their natural lifespan, Arts Commons has oiled, cleaned, and repaired them time and time again - unfortunately, that couldn’t last forever.

Slim and compact, the escalators were installed in the Jack Singer Concert Hall lobby before the building's opening in 1985. They were designed with a small footprint in mind and thus were able to cross back and forth over the back wall without impacting the capacity of the lobby or the Jack Singer Concert Hall itself. Now, narrow escalators like these have long been discontinued in favour of roomier escalators that can accommodate two people side by side. That means parts to repair these antiques are no longer available.

Why not replace them entirely?

The Jack Singer Concert Hall is a hard working facility, seeing an average of 39 engagements every month, when you include both the hall and the lobby. With space at a premium in this city, the loss of the Hall and the Lobby for the 18-month to 2-year time frame that it would take to fully remove and replace the escalators would be devastating. The project itself is the equivalent of removing four city buses. In addition, the Hall and Lobby in its current configuration is not large enough to house modern escalators, meaning that replacing them would result in the demolition and rebuilding of the back wall of of the Jack Singer Concert Hall.

What now?

After months of back and forth with experts and technicians, we’re working to use parts from modern escalators to reverse engineer a solution for our unique people movers. If all goes according to plan, we’ll have them back up and running, elevating concertgoers and event attendees, until the beginning of the Arts Commons Transformation project, part 2: the modernization of the existing building.

Thank you for taking this journey with us. For now, we’ve opened the +15 Hallway door for ticket holders with seats above the Mezzanine level. For more information, please click here to see what we’re doing to make the arts accessible to all or call 403-294-9494 for mobility assistance.