Lifesavers Tower

With all visitors required to make their way from the top of the Better Living Center down to the exit, the ideal way to go was to take the glass elevator on the building's exterior to the rooftop. Glass elevators were themselves a novelty in the mid-1960s (the first having been installed in a San Diego hotel only a decade earlier). By letting the rider enjoy the visual experience of rising up in the total safety of an enclosure, they offered something refreshingly different from the claustrophobic setting of a traditional elevator. For many a Fairgoer, a ride in the Better Living Center's "Glass Tower" elevator and the New York State Pavilion's "Sky Streak" elevators would be their first exposure to this new kind of technology.

The Better Living Center's elevator had an official sponsor in Lifesavers candy. This represented a nice bit of symmetry with the 1939 New York World's Fair where Lifesavers had sponsored the famous Parachute Tower which took passengers up to the highest point possible in the Fair in a harness that then dropped them back to Earth as if they were in a parachute. The Glass Tower elevator would not provide a similar thrill but the apparatus, adorned by a giant white Life Savers symbol at the top, could take Fairgoers up to the second highest observation point in the entire Fair offering a fine panoramic view that could be enhanced through the use of coin-operated telescopic binoculars. The giant white Life Saver on the top of the tower was added during the Fair; when it opened there was only one inside the tower.