Taken for a Ride : ‘Hillevators’ Give Homeowners a Lift

Gloria Kratz has a lot of ups and downs in her life--all because of an unusual household device that fascinates neighborhood kids, new residents and passing motorists.

The contraption gives her a lift when she’s loaded with packages or wants to entertain youngsters and guests, but it bugs her when the curious stop her with questions while she’s rushing out on errands or hurrying home from work.

The unusual device is called a “hillevator,” otherwise known as a hill climber or hillside tram. It hugs the hill leading to the Kratz home, 52 steps up from the street.

Hillevators are small, railway-type cars that can carry from one to six people, along with their garbage and groceries, up and down an incline. The cars, which are powered by electricity and pulled by cables, can be built to go as fast as 300 feet a minute.

Hillevators are found wherever there are hillside houses and the home owners, for one reason or another, don’t want to climb the stairs.

“Our house was brand new when we got it in 1989. The builder put it in,” Kratz said of the conveyance, which her college-age son, Jim, says moves along “at a very slow walking pace.”

There are hundreds of hillevators in Southern California, said Stephen Crow, sales manager at Elevator Repair & Service Co., a Los Angeles firm that services and manufactures hillevators.

Although many have been dismantled over the years, some of the devices date back as far as the 1920s, while others are new or under construction, he said.

Ed Miller, general manager of Golden State Elevator Service in Van Nuys, has built and repaired hillevators for the last 20 years from Sand Canyon to Benedict Canyon and from Lake Arrowhead to Lake Sherwood.

“And there are a lot of old ones in La Canada,” he said. Added Crow: “There is a cluster of them in Malibu, and there are quite a few in the Hollywood Hills. There are also some in Laguna, Brentwood and Bel-Air.”

One of the best known hillevators is at the Chemosphere House in the Hollywood Hills. The two-bedroom, 2,200-square-foot house, designed by architect John Lautner to resemble a space ship, was completed in 1961 and sits on top of a single concrete column on a site that had been considered unbuildable.

“The hill climber allows you to get to the house without taking the stairs,” said Lautner’s assistant, Duncan Nicholson. “But the hillevator wasn’t working the last time I was there, so I took the stairs up,” Nicholson lamented. There are 105 steep steps to the house.

The homeowner, who bought the house in 1985 and never lived there but uses the place for parties such as Lautner’s 80th birthday, recently rebuilt the hillevator. So now it can climb its 100 feet of track in 60 seconds and has an enclosed cab with a dozen safety mechanisms.

Sue Kunin and her husband also recently rebuilt the hillevator at their 40-year-old Pacific Palisades home. She described the one they replaced as “a built-with-loving-hands-at-home kind, which was never working.”

“It was here when my husband bought the house (in 1977),” she said, “and whenever it would stop working, I’d say that we should put the house up for sale. It (a hillevator) is a must for those of us on hillsides, especially if we’re at Social Security age . . . which we are.”

Although her front door is almost three stories above street level, she usually walks up for the exercise, but when she has her arms full, she uses her hillevator. It can seat only two people but can carry up to 450 pounds.

“Younger people find it difficult walking up all of our stairs, and with five loads of groceries, forget it,” she said.

New York developer Joel Schur built a hillevator at his Holmby Hills home in 1985 “because we needed something to shuttle people and supplies back and forth,” he said. “We’ve found it to be very useful, though there are two stairways . . . right next to it.”

The front of his lot is at street level, but the rear, where he built a house and a tennis court, is in a 300-foot-deep gorge.

“I didn’t want a cookie-cutter home,” he said, “so rather than bring the land up (with fill dirt), I figured I’d bring people down and let the natural beauty of the terrain prevail.”

He consulted with a structural engineer on the design and drove heavy beams 8 to 10 feet into the ground for support.

The end result cost Schur more than $200,000, because of the extensive engineering and the fact that he installed a hillevator with a handsome cab of mahogany and brass fittings that can go 300 feet a minute and carry up to four large adults or 1,000 pounds.

But new hillevators can be built for as little as $30,000, not including the price of land and footings, sources say.

Schur saved some costs by having the hillevator built while he was developing the rest of his property.

“If you don’t put it in when developing, it can be a bear to do afterward, because you need the heavy equipment to dig the dirt out and compact it every foot or so; otherwise, the rains will wash it out,” he said.

Hillevators can require a lot of engineering, said San Juan Capistrano architect John McInnes, who designed one for his own residence, about 90 steps down the side of a cliff. He hasn’t yet built the car but has the track and other equipment in place.

“I have a stainless steel I-beam running down the center, which will have the wheels and brake pedal attached. It all has to be stainless steel so it won’t rust and will look good,” he said.

Because operating mechanisms are exposed to the elements, corrosion often creates electrical and other problems that can be costly to repair. Only a few companies service and manufacture hillevators, “because of the liability, which is high,” said Miller of Golden State Elevator Service Co.

Crow says he has seen some hill climbers that “look like they were constructed in someone’s garage and probably were, before there were any codes.” But most hillevators have such built-in safety equipment as a kill switch to stop the car if something goes wrong. “So hill climbers are usually safe, if not misused,” Crow said.

All hillevators work much the same way. “They run up and down on a track on a cable-driven hoist machine. They all have tracks with a wheel or roller guide. They all have a carriage or platform with wheels and a cab or bench platform where the people ride,” Crow said.

Hillevators are sometimes called funiculars, but a funicular has two cars that counterbalance each other on parallel sets of rails. One of the more famous funiculars is the 91-year-old Angel’s Flight, which is being restored in downtown Los Angeles.

As a rule, a funicular can carry more passengers than a hillevator, but hillevator cabs can be equally charming. Though most are metal frame with wood interiors, Miller built one entirely out of redwood, another completely of oak. He built a luggage rack in yet another.

“They can be very individualistic,” Crow said of the cars.

The speed of hillevators also varies. Some don’t go any faster than 50 feet a minute. Others go 300 feet a minute, like Schur’s.

“The length of the run also changes (from one hillevator to another),” Crow observed. The longest run Miller remembers was about 250 feet. “But it’s not the length of the thing that can make it an exciting ride,” Schur said. “It’s the angle of the incline.”

Some rides are steeper than others, depending on the angle. If the angle is greater than 52 degrees, a hillevator is not practical, according to Crow. “Then you need to go to a vertical conveyance, like an elevator,” he said.

Elevators were considered for several condo buildings in Malibu when they were being planned about 20 years ago, but there wasn’t enough room for an elevator tower, said one of the original residents. So hillevators were installed for each of the five condo buildings.

Margaret Walkup, who jokes about being called “Margaret Rideup,” lives in one of the buildings. She often takes the hillevator instead of walking up the 50 stairs to her condo. “It’s just great with loads of groceries,” she said.

Bob Redpath, who lives at the top of another of the buildings, frequently takes the hill climber instead of walking up the 90 stairs to his condo. “But we’ve worn out a lot of pizza delivery men,” he said.

Jeff Kanter, who has lived in Redpath’s building for 12 years, remembers a couple who always took the hill climber. “Then they’d get on their Stairmaster” and work out, he recalled. “If they wanted stairs, they should have taken the real ones.”

But when it comes to bringing in the groceries, even he rides on the hillevator instead of walking up the 80 steps to his unit.

Kanter, a Hollywood writer-turned-agent, thought about using his hill climber in a chase scene he was writing for the 1970s ABC police drama “Starsky and Hutch.” “But it’s so slow, you can walk up the stairs faster,” he said.

That hillevator would be better used as the setting for a romantic scene, especially when there is a full moon over Santa Monica Bay, he suggested.

The view helped sell Redpath on buying his unit last December. “The real estate agent took me up in the tram so I could see the view unfold. It was a neat experience,” he said.

Kanter says his hillevator, which is made of metal, is “really just a rattly cage that goes up and down the mountain,” but he could recall no bad experiences with it.

“A couple of cats got stuck in ours once,” he remembered, “but they just stayed on and enjoyed the ride.”