These pictures tell a story.

[magibrain]

This is the elevator that leads to the White Collar offices.
From this, we know that the floors at least go up to 24.
We don't see whether or not this is the top of the button plate, though.

For ficcing purposes, I need to know exactly how high the buttons on the plate go.

Larger image under cut.


I fucked with the colors and sharpness on this so it'd be easier to count the buttons.
COUNT THE BUTTONS, FRIENDS. THERE ARE TEN OF THEM WHICH SEEM TO LEAD TO FLOORS.
(POSSIBLY ELEVEN, IF THAT CENTERED ONE GOES TO THE LOBBY.)

Considering that the sets and props department obviously didn't think I'd ever need to find out many floors were in the building by counting the buttons in the elevator, I decided to just ask the internet how many floors the NYC federal building has.

Cue Wikipedia:

The Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building at 26 Federal Plaza on Foley Square in the Civic Center district of Manhattan, New York City houses many Federal government agencies, and, at over 41 stories, is the tallest federal building in the United States.

...

Sometimes I don't know why I bother doing research.

(Counting the windows suggests to me that "over 41 stories" means "41 floors of offices and a ground floor that probably has a lobby or something". I can work with that. Though I need to come up with a plausible reason for Neal to accidentally hit a floor button that's twenty floors off his actual destination.) (It would be a lot easier if the federal building were only 24 floors tall, to be honest.) (I wonder if I could just claim that it was. Would anyone except me care?) (I could claim that in White Collar 'verse, the federal building was at 41 Federal Plaza and had 26 stories...)

Comments

[marycontrary]

I am super impressed. Such research! If you're trying to get Neal on the roof, couldn't he just want to go there? I once spent a day in a strange city going into every tall building and seeing how high up I could get without someone stopping me.

[magibrain]

Heh. Well, the issue is, I don't want him on the roof; I want him to accidentally end up on a floor which doesn't exist according to the building plans, but which could plausibly-enough exist that Neal might not think "Wait, floor 78? There is no possible way this building has 78 floors." So I was thinking that the top floor + 1 would be a good solution; Neal always goes to floor 21, he might not care how many floors are in the building, as most of them are filled with government agencies he doesn't find all that interesting. (Like the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office. Sounds like a bunch of paperwork he'd probably never even have a motive to break into.) In that case, if the building is 41 floors tall, he might end up on floor 42 and not be immediately aware that this is a weird thing that just happened.

But if he ends up on floor 42 and the building has 42 floors, that's significantly less weird.

And, hah! That sounds like a fun day. What city was it?

I think the strangest thing I've ever ended up doing in a strange city was wandering around downtown Chicago at 2 AM carrying a car-top carrier that looked like a coffin. (A bunch of streets were blocked off for the Taste of Chicago festival and we couldn't find our hostel and were getting stressy about driving around so we decided to park our car in a parking garage and explore on foot. Except that we'd almost gotten stuck in the last parking garage because the cartop carrier made our car too tall to drive in all the way. So we decided we'd just carry the thing.) (That was an interesting night.)

[marycontrary]

Tokyo -- it was cool, you could get up to an observation level in a lot of buildings, and there were often little shops at the lobby level. I was really low on cash, so I managed to buy lunch with my credit card at a Japanese Starbucks inside one. I might have been the first person ever to do that there: it took two workers and the manager to work the credit card machine. Fortunately they gave me my food first, because I was ravenous. Less fortunately, I'm not 100% convinced they didn't give up and just give me my food for free.