Ten Floors Short of the 54th
Vegas Travelog #5
Hilton Resorts World, Las Vegas - Wed, 29 Nov 2023. 3pm.
I wrote yesterday about my room on the 54th floor at the Resorts World casino. There's something that's been bothering my engineer/architect-fu all week, though. It's not actually the 54th floor. Sure, the room numbers all start with "54" and the button in the elevator says "54", but in truth it's 10 floors short of that. How? There are no floors 40-49.
There are no buttons for 40-49 in the elevator. None of the three banks of elevators goes to 40-49. And when the elevator's floor indicator goes from 39 to 50 on the way up, and 50 to 39 on the way down, it's an immediate transition. There's no pause like it's bypassing 10 secret levels. Those levels just don't exist.
Why no floors 40-49? My best hypothesis is that it's because 4 is considered a very unlucky number in Chinese. The Chinese word for "4" is a near homophone for "death". The gambling company behind Resorts World is based in Malaysia and Singapore. When I've traveled in Greater China I've observed that buildings frequently don't have floors 4, 14, 28, etc. I don't think I saw an elevator with all of 40-49 missing... though the few times I visited a building at least that tall I didn't look too carefully at the elevator keypads.
Hilton Resorts World, Las Vegas - Wed, 29 Nov 2023. 3pm.
I wrote yesterday about my room on the 54th floor at the Resorts World casino. There's something that's been bothering my engineer/architect-fu all week, though. It's not actually the 54th floor. Sure, the room numbers all start with "54" and the button in the elevator says "54", but in truth it's 10 floors short of that. How? There are no floors 40-49.
There are no buttons for 40-49 in the elevator. None of the three banks of elevators goes to 40-49. And when the elevator's floor indicator goes from 39 to 50 on the way up, and 50 to 39 on the way down, it's an immediate transition. There's no pause like it's bypassing 10 secret levels. Those levels just don't exist.
Why no floors 40-49? My best hypothesis is that it's because 4 is considered a very unlucky number in Chinese. The Chinese word for "4" is a near homophone for "death". The gambling company behind Resorts World is based in Malaysia and Singapore. When I've traveled in Greater China I've observed that buildings frequently don't have floors 4, 14, 28, etc. I don't think I saw an elevator with all of 40-49 missing... though the few times I visited a building at least that tall I didn't look too carefully at the elevator keypads.