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Space set aside for such amenities as elevators cannot be rented. So building owners are naturally attracted to elevator systems that use minimal space for hoistways. Otis' "double decker" was one solution. The first Otis double-deck elevator was installed in 1931 in the 67-story Cities Service building at 70 Pine Street in New York City. It was meant to simultaneously serve a subway station planned for the basement of the building, and the lobby level, but the station was never built, and the double decker was never operated, except maybe in test. By 1935, however, Otis had "officially" unveiled the double decker, and it proved to be an appealing innovation for tall buildings with heavy traffic flows at specific times of day. In those types of buildings, it serves passengers better and faster than single-deck systems, while using much less of a building's valuable real estate. Double-deck elevators are joined, one atop the other in the same hoistway. One car serves even number floors and the other, odd. Passengers board at two levels, depending on which floor they want to reach. One entrance might be at subway level; the other might be at street level lobby. Since passengers enter and exit the cars two floors at a time, a higher volume of passengers can travel faster than a single car would permit. Building owners benefit, too, since fewer hoistways mean more net rentable area, which means more revenue over the life of the building. Clever though they are, double decks are not for every building, and they are far less simple than they might seem. The system of ropes and counterweights that control them is unusually complex, and the Otis double-deck elevators introduced in the 1930s require building floors to be at identical distances everywhere the elevator stops so cars always will be level with the floor when passengers enter and exit. That requirement changed in 2003 when Otis improved on the double-deck elevator system with another first, a "super" double-deck elevator, developed by Nippon Otis, that does not require evenly spaced floors. The super double-deck elevator is the world's first to use flexible height technology in buildings with unevenly spaced floors. Nippon Otis’ first installation of super double-deck elevators was in the 54-story Mori Tower, a building in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills complex with irregularly spaced floors, solving the building’s spacing problem by raising or lowering the elevator up to two meters (6.6 feet) to align it with the floor. For buildings like Citicorp in New York, First Canadian Place in Toronto or the Treasury Building in Singapore, the double-deck elevator has proven to be an efficient and practical solution. For the Mori Tower, the super double deck was the answer.
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