We don’t expect enough from elevator doors these days. We want them to open, to close and to stop when we touch the door when someone’s racing to make the car. We don’t ask them to be beautiful — we just want them to be functional. But there was a time when they were, and examples of that can still be found in Minneapolis.
The original purpose of the exterior doors — the landing doors, if you want the technical term — was to keep people from tumbling down the shaft. This would seem to be quite avoidable, but apparently it was a problem in the early days.
Charles N. Judson, who patented the car-and-shaft door system that had one set on the floor and one set inside the car, explained the need for safety features: “It is well known that elevator shafts and cars are a great source of danger to the public from the fact that through the negligence or carelessness of the attendant or through faulty construction, the doors or gates of such shafts or cars are either left open or are permitted to open by the action of gravity while the elevator car is in motion and away from a landing place, and thereby, persons are permitted to fall through the shaft and either [be] killed or badly injured.”
Early landing doors were scissor-grates, like the doors inside the cars. If you’re old enough you might remember dim childhood memories of elevator operators, who sat on a stool and had a big wheel to get the car from one floor to the other. He or she would close an accordion-style metal door, colloquially called a birdcage. You’d see the concrete walls of the elevator shaft, or hoistway, as you traveled — it could leave you a bit claustrophobic. The style lasted a few decades beyond the introduction of the landing doors we know today, but eventually the elevators were fully automated and equipped with thick doors inside and out.
The outside of the doors was often ornate because beauty was an essential element of a high-class office tower. It was a billboard for the building’s style and purpose.

A fine — and expensive-looking — example can be found at the Medical Arts Building. The building’s style is Gothic, a popular look in the 1920s. It suggests that you’re taking the elevator up to have some leeches applied, but people didn’t think too hard about the implications. The golden doors have the building’s initials, MA, in stylized Blackletter or Gothic typefaces. The doors also feature stylized caducei, the rod with the snakes, considered to be a symbol of medicine. Custom work like this gave a building extra cachet.
The 1920s had medieval styles like the Medical Arts on one block, and ultramodern design on another.
Rand Tower elevators: