Do Buildings Not Have 13 Floors

You won t find it on the panels and you won t find it in the stairwells.

Do buildings not have 13 floors. The habit of leaving out the 13th floor in tall hotels is a relatively new one. Prices for 13th floor apartments the handful of them that exist don t sell at a discount according to jonathan. Both the plaza and the waldorf astoria have labeled 13th floors. A lot of older buildings still have the 13th floor and the palmer house hilton is a 140 year old property so it s tough to say whether the developers were even concerned with that at the time adds a hotel customer service rep at the hotel.

Italians omit the number 13 from their national lottery. Airplanes have no 13th aisle. Many cities do not. Hospitals and hotels regularly have no room number 13.

The empire state building has one. Image zoom getty. Skyscrapers did not come about until 1885. A good example is that some have suggested the 13th floor in government buildings is not really missing but actually contains top secret governmental departments or more generally that it is proof of something sinister or clandestine going on.

Eventually this time and culture spanning superstition made its way to the architecture of america. The most common include denoting what would otherwise be considered the thirteenth floor as level 14 giving the thirteenth floor an alternate designation such as 12a or m the. While the 14 th floor is actually the 13 th floor for obvious structural reasons guests seem to take comfort. That tradition stuck until the need for taller buildings came about in the 20 th century.

With that said some of nyc s most famous buildings do have 13th floors. But as rational thought will dictate hotels and buildings higher than 12 floors of course have a 13th floor however they do away with it by simply renaming it something else. Many airports skip the 13th gate. As one of the city s oldest hotels the luxurious palmer house hilton still has its 13th floor.

Omitting the 13th floor may take a variety of forms. One world trade center includes it as do all hilton international hotels. Pulling a number out of the floor plan serves to make a building seem taller. They didn t want to give anyone a reason not to want to rent space in their building.

Starting in the 20th century when skyscrapers began cropping up in bigger cities buildings overwhelmingly forwent marking the 13th floor because of simple economics. On streets in florence italy the house between number 12 and 14 is addressed as 12 and a half. Today 85 percent of elevator panels don t have the number 13. More than 80 percent of high rises lack a 13th floor.