An aerial view of a tall, decaying brutalist building with multiple rusted, open-air elevators visible on its exterior.

From the drone’s distant viewpoint, the most dramatic detail of the thousand-foot Tower of Terror is the outward-facing elevators, which jut directly toward the open air instead of being hidden inside the building. Each of the six elevator shafts ends in a large, exposed platform where the elevator cars themselves sit visible from the outside, their metal frames rusted and scarred as if they’ve been repeatedly slammed by forces far stronger than machinery. The elevator doors on these outward-facing cars are half-destroyed or missing entirely, leaving the front of each car open to the void so that anyone riding would be staring straight out over the landscape with nothing but empty air below. Thick steel tracks run along the outside edges of the cars, bolted to the hotel’s cracked façade, and the cars hang in different positions—some slightly raised, some resting low, and one stuck crookedly as if frozen mid-fall. From afar, you can see cables swaying faintly in the wind and bits of loose metal rattling around them, making the outward-facing elevators look like skeletal cages clinging desperately to the tower’s scarred front face, their open fronts revealing only darkness beyond. See more