From the Wall Street Journal...Henderson is labeling the floors of its property at 39 Conduit Road (Hong Kong) with numbers that increase, but not in the conventional 1-then-2 way. The floor above 39, for example, is 60. And the top three floors are consecutively labeled 66, 68 and 88.
When a 13th floor was added to the Skirvin Hotel in Oklahoma City, in the 1930s, it was named the 14th floor. The hotel was shuttered in 1988 and reopened and renamed in 2007 by Hilton, which nonetheless kept the name for the top floor. The 22-story headquarters of Chicago-based Marc Realty avoids throwing off the numbers in higher floors by labeling the 13th floor "14A." It labels the 14th floor "14B."
The negative associations with 13 have been traced to the number of diners at the Last Supper, before the betrayal of Jesus. But Underwood Dudley, professor of mathematics at Depauw University, says he wasn't able to verify this. "As far as I can tell, some number had to be unlucky, and it was 13," Dr. Dudley says.
From Wikipedia...
In 1881, an influential group of New Yorkers led by U.S. Civil War veteran Captain William Fowler came together to put an end to this and other superstitions. They formed a dinner cabaret club, which they called the Thirteen Club. At the first meeting, on Friday 13 January 1881 at 8:13 p.m., 13 people sat down to dine in room 13 of the venue. The guests walked under a ladder to enter the room and were seated among piles of spilled salt. All of the guests survived. Thirteen Clubs sprang up all over North America for the next 40 years. Their activities were regularly reported in leading newspapers, and their numbers included five future U.S. presidents, from Chester A. Arthur to Theodore Roosevelt. Thirteen Clubs had various imitators, but they all gradually faded from interest as people became less superstitious.
No comments:
Post a Comment