The Chapel is in Mt Hope Cemetery in Rochester, municipal property and was declared obsolete in the 70s. Since then it has deteriorated with the only maintenance being boarding up to keep kids and winos out. Been many problems over there, including the Director & one of her helpers stealing bronze markers wholesale. They eventually got busted when another worker blew the whistle loud to TV Stations. The politicians had told the cops to keep their noses out of the theft.
It's a very old cemetery, and the area around the Chapel is pretty full, so logistics aren't favorable to re-use. The Mount part of the name is no joke, that land area is very hilly and steep.
The pics I posted are from college kids who call themselves urban archeologists. That translates to kids who enter vacant structures and photograph everything in site in the hope they will eventually understand what they have a picture of. Unfortunately, the nature of their effort causes pictures to come and go from various places on the web. It also occasionally causes Firemen and Rescue crews to go pull the Jr Archeologist out of their entrapped situation.
Water elevators, with the exception of the Eiffel Tower as originally built, were quite common prior to the 20th Century. Freezing was not a problem for most. Eiffel shut down its elevators in Winter because the cylinders could freeze. The majority were similar in structure to the old gas station in ground lift where the piston came up from the floor.
When the piston is in the down position there is very little water in the cylinder, and that is all at the bottom where temperature will generally be between 40 and 50 degrees f. Also factor in that flowing water doesn't easily freeze, so a weep drain is installed to maintain sufficient flow through the valve body to prevent freezing. The City had an unlimited supply of water at no cost from the reservoir one hill over. When you look at the piston diameter under the platform you realize it has to be that large because it works on low pressure, and that is a function of the vertical relationship to the reservoir a mile away.
Add to that, frost forms on top of the ground first and travels horizontally before it goes down into the ground. The old Krauts who built this town had a good understanding of that, and how to work with Nature rather than against. When the old Bausch & Lomb buildings from the 1850s were demolished 6" thick cork walls were found surrounding the cellars to a depth of 6 feet. The cork insulated the wall and prevented frost force from acting against the cellar wall. Given that the Chapel was designed by Warner, I'd not be surprised to find wall insulation there, particularly given the topography.
This pic of the cut sandstone building pretty well says a large part of the design was based on storage capacity. It sits on about a 1 acre meadow that is sort of flat.