The first he found in Israel, the second in Hackensack, New Jersey
I have definitely taught kids to think about negative numbers and number lines by thinking about elevators. I don't know much about teaching younger grades or teaching negative numbers for the first time, but I can totally imagine giving kids a picture like this and asking them to describe the building where this elevator lives. Or some kind of problem about a building that adds an underground garage with the question "How should they label the number on the elevator button?" Even with the standard US systems for labeling underground space (P1, P2, P3 and stuff like that), I think it's interesting to talk about what order those should go in. Maybe it's not that exciting, but it feels like there's a little something there.
Also thinking about elevator numbering, I feel like there might be something with the way that many European countries label their floors by having floor 1 as the floor above the lobby. Or with Americans skipping the 13th floor. Is there some kind of function rule you can write to figure out how many floors the building actually has? It would be a piecewise function because the rule for calculating how many floors for buildings above 13 would be different than for buildings with fewer than 13 floors.
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