It was 8 a.m. in Ramón Rivera’s elevator and the morning rush was on. The buzzer rang.
Mr. Rivera glanced at the ancient-looking indicator board.
“Ooh, we’re going to the penthouse!” he said. A little white flag had popped up behind the letters “PH.”
He pushed the control handle to the left. The elevator, a little mahogany-paneled palace on vertical rails, rose past floor after floor, numbers sweeping by behind the gold scissor gate.
On the way up, the buzzer sounded again; a white flag popped up behind the 8. Mr. Rivera, a courtly man with a silver mustache and a navy blue uniform, put his face up to the door as the elevator sailed past the eighth floor. “I’ll be right back,” he called softly.
Continue reading the main storyThere are 69,381 passenger elevators in this vertically obsessed city, and nearly all of them promise a journey about as exotic and exciting as making toast. You get in, you push a button, the doors open a few seconds later at your destination.
But there remain quite a few machines, manually controlled and chauffeur-driven, where climbing aboard is more like taking a short trip on the Orient Express.
Mr. Rivera’s elevator is in a wedge-shaped Venetian Gothic tower overlooking Prospect Park in Brooklyn, but others can be found in many neighborhoods where old customs persist, notably along the grand boulevards of the Upper East Side and the more formidable reaches of the Upper West.
On Fifth Avenue, where the hand that guides the elevator wears a white glove, there is a car painted with Renaissance-style angels and gods and goddesses; it’s like riding in a king’s coffin. On West 67th Street just off Central Park, the elevator man at the Hotel des Artistes building rests between trips in a carved wooden throne beneath a mural of ships in the harbor. In Brooklyn Heights, a lurid red-and-gold chamber described by the building manager as “a little bordelloesque inside” comes complete with black leather divan suitable for a reclining odalisque.
There are scruffier models where the cars have been blandly renovated but the antique controls remain, and imperfectly maintained ones that shudder and jerk as the elevator man flips the lever. There are fin-de-siècle birdcages where car and shaft are unenclosed but for ornate wrought-iron gates and the ride brings a pleasant rush of vertigo.
Most of the elevators are in residential buildings, but a few war horses serve heavy duty in commercial complexes.
Collectively they form a hidden museum of obsolete technology and anachronistic employment, a network of cabinets of wonder staffed round the clock. No one knows how many there are, exactly. The city Department of Buildings offered a list of more than 600, but spot checks indicated that most had gone push-button long ago. On the other hand, officials at Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, to which most doormen and elevator operators belong, said they knew of only one or two.
A non-exhaustive field survey this fall turned up 53 buildings with manual passenger elevators. There are undoubtedly dozens more, but probably not hundreds.
Why they still exist in such relative profusion, when the city is down to its last few seltzer men and its final full-time typewriter repair shop, when replacement parts are no longer made and must be machined by hand, is a question with many answers. But sentiment plays a large part.
After picking up his passenger in the penthouse of 47 Plaza Street West in Brooklyn that balmy Friday morning last month, Mr. Rivera piloted the elevator back down to the eighth floor. A resident named Bonnie Covey got on. She had not minded the wait. “We’re a little old-fashioned here,” Ms. Covey said, “but we like it.”
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Staffed elevators of any sort are expensive — they can require several hundred thousand dollars a year in salaries for operators — and at most buildings, a new elevator without attendants would pay for itself within a few years. Buildings that keep the old elevators generally figure the benefits of added security and service outweigh the costs.
At 200 West 15th Street in Chelsea, the super, Jose Cherrez, said the elevator men sometimes function as chaperones for single young women in the building. “They get tipsy, come home a little drunk,” he said. “The elevator person makes sure she goes to the right floor and gets to the right apartment.”
Some elevator operators attract cult followings. Manny Colon is so beloved at Brooklyn Friends School that the school auctions off a shift as his student co-pilot at its annual fund-raiser. Last year a family paid $660.
There are practical considerations for keeping the old elevators, too. At Mr. Rivera’s building, the elevator shaft is so narrow that the car would have to be drastically shrunk to make room for the workings of a modern machine. You can’t fit a 36-inch door in a 12-inch space, said the resident manager, Robert Mehl. “And if you lose 18 inches, you can’t get a wheelchair in there.”
About 15 years ago, the shareholders of 990 Fifth Avenue, a fortresslike limestone co-op building across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, succumbed to the pressure to modernize and bought a new push-button elevator.
It is still boxed up in the basement.
“They never wanted to install it,” said Fatos Muriqi, a doorman at the building. “It’s been down there for 15 years waiting for them to change it over.”
Ramon Rivera was born in Barceloneta, Puerto Rico, about 82 years ago, came to New York as a teenager and has run an elevator in 47 Plaza Street West for 35 years. He raised two children on his elevator man’s salary. One is an occupational therapist; the other works in jewelry. Mr. Rivera has been a widower for 25 years. He lived nearby in Park Slope when it was more affordable but moved recently to Sunset Park with an informally adopted son, who makes him a simple lunch of fruit and half a sandwich each day.
Mr. Rivera arrives at work Wednesday through Sunday just after 6 a.m. and takes his elevator down to the basement. In a small locker room decorated with a warped print of dogs shooting pool, he changes out of his flannel shirt, faded bluejeans and Mets cap and into a white dress shirt, a black clip-on tie and a blazer with “47 Plaza Street” in yellow letters, and matching slacks. He slicks his thinning hair back in the small round mirror in the bathroom and brings the elevator back upstairs.
Forty-seven Plaza Street West was designed by the celebrated Sicilian-American architect Rosario Candela, creator of some of the most coveted addresses on Fifth Avenue. It opened in 1928. Its dim, uncluttered lobby gives the impression of opulence balanced with restraint. There are terrazzo floors and diamond-paned stained-glass windows and period chairs and settees that are said to be original. The two elevators, one on each end, just about identical, continue the castles-and-coats-of-arms theme. The panels of carved dark wood on their outer doors depict a kneeling woman holding a dove, with two dogs at her feet.
Inside, the elevator cars are about five feet wide and four feet deep.
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Below the indicator box, where a modern elevator just has blank space, is the black-handled mechanism that drives the elevator. It’s called a control switch. In Mr. Rivera’s elevator, the switchworks are hidden within a weathered-bronze Frisbee-shaped cover bearing the logo of Haughton Elevators. (Haughton’s competitors included Gurney, Watson, Otis and A.B. See. Only Otis still exists.)
As Mr. Rivera throws the handle to the left, a swiveling contact bar inside the cover opens one circuit and closes another. This sends two electrical messages to a control panel in the basement: to power up the motor, and make it spin forward. The motor pulls the cables that lift the car.
Riding in an old manual elevator makes you realize how boringly quiet today’s elevators are. An old elevator makes a sort of music: the reassuring low hum of the motor, the gentle creaks of turning wheels, the click as each floor goes by, the jingle of the gate closing, like parting a bead curtain or sifting a pile of coins. The only jarring note in Mr. Rivera’s elevator is the call buzzer. It sounds like the wrong answer on a game show.
One of Mr. Rivera’s colleagues, Peter Gari, said he could identify certain residents by the buzz — long or short, or a double hit. “Some people buzz and then a couple of minutes later they buzz again. You get to the floor and they tell you, ‘I’m running late.’ Not my problem, wake up earlier.”
Over the decades, 47 Plaza Street has made concessions to modernity. The elevator signals are now routed through a computer in the basement. And since about 1993, the elevators have been what is called “self-leveling.” Mr. Rivera demonstrated what this means. “I get to 11, 11½…” He let go of the handle and the car glided to a halt at the 12th floor. “It stops by itself. How beautiful!”
When Otis developed the self-leveling elevator in 1917, it was a big deal. James Montgomery Flagg made a film the next year called “The Good Sport” in which the hero invents a self-leveling elevator and receives a $100,000 check. “Your invention is a boon to humanity!” says the owner of the Social Uplift Elevator Co. “Ladies and gentlemen — No more ‘Watch your step’ — This is the first elevator that ever stopped even with the floor.”
The technology spread slowly. Very slowly, in some cases: There are still many elevators in the city that are not self-leveling and must be landed precisely, kind of like a plane.
“I was terrible when I first started,” said Mike Merille, who has operated an elevator at 890 Broadway, home of the American Ballet Theater and the Ballet Tech dance school, since 2001. “But it’s muscle memory by now. I don’t even look.”
In the 1930s, a series of strikes and strike threats by elevator operators led bosses to respond with threats of their own. “Building owners fear that any substantial increases in wages for service employees will force them to install labor-saving devices, which will result in a large displacement of labor,” The Times reported in 1935. Elevator operators in those days worked up to 72 hours a week for as little as 30 cents an hour, equivalent to about $5.60 an hour today. (Now they make around $24 an hour.)
Push-button elevators had actually been around since the 1890s, but were not practical for larger buildings. They were slow. Initially they could make only one stop per trip. Later, they could make multiple stops, but only in the order the buttons were pressed.
It took until 1950 for Otis to perfect a push-button system smart enough to handle the traffic and shifting demands for service over the course of the day in a multi-elevator building. The company’s Autotronic system, Otis boasted in advertisements, “minimizes the human element” and “gives tenants a sprightly feeling of independence.”
The elevator man’s fate was sealed.
Almost.
Sixty-five years later, the human element still has its fans. At 47 Plaza Street West, on that same morning in early November, Mr. Rivera opened his elevator door and Bob Rubin got on.
“How you doing, Ramon?” he asked.
“I’ve had my ups and downs,” Mr. Rivera replied.
“I’ve never heard that one before,” Mr. Rubin said.
In the kitchen of the apartment he has lived in for 41 years, Mr. Rubin, a construction lawyer, expounded on his love for the elevators.
“What intrigues me about them is a kind of elegant simplicity,” he said. He fetched a stovetop espresso maker known as a moka pot. “This thing,” he said, “makes a better cup of coffee than that one,” and he pointed to the Keurig on the counter.
Mr. Rubin does not lock his apartment door. He has found the elevator men to be paragons of trustworthiness. “They know everything that’s going on in the building, but none of them has ever been a gossip to the best of my knowledge,” he said. “There is just an exceptional level of discretion.”
Discretion is sometimes called for, said Mr. Gari, Mr. Rivera’s counterpart at the north elevator that day.
“Sheeee, woohoo!” said Mr. Gari. “Boy, through the years, oh, yeah.”
“At my old job” — he used to work an elevator on Park Avenue — “sometimes people would ask, ‘Is my spouse home? And when did they get in?’ Home or not home, I’d say yes or no. But as far as when, I’d say, ‘I don’t remember, you can ask them.’”
Visitors must be carefully screened. “One time we had a process server show a gun to me and Ramon,” Mr. Gari said. “He asks, ‘Is so-and-so home?’ He showed me a badge. I called up on the intercom, no one answered, I told him, ‘They’re not there.’ He wanted me to take him up there. I said no. He said, ‘I’m the law, you’re obstructing justice,’ and he shows this gun. Ramon is like, what are you going to do, shoot me?”
Not everyone is charmed by the old elevators. “I’d lean toward push-a-button, convenience, quickness,” said Brian Kramer, a member of the co-op board at the Kenilworth on Central Park West, which has had some difficult conversations in recent years about upgrading the elevators. When there is only one doorman on duty, he has to somehow keep an eye on the door while running the elevator. “It’s tricky,” Mr. Kramer said.
Two doors down from Mr. Rivera’s building, at 39 Plaza Street West, a resident who would not let her name be published for fear of reprisals from the co-op board voiced exasperation. “If you want to go down to the laundry, it’s six trips, and someone has to take you up and down,” she said. “And the elevator regularly breaks down. It’s beautiful but it’s past its usefulness. It needs constant maintenance.”
Many old manual elevators are maintained by McGlynn Hays and Co., a 117-year-old concern that claims to be one of only two service companies in the city that has its own machine shop, on West 47th Street. Sooner or later, every moving part on an elevator needs an overhaul, said the company’s president, Gerard Carlucci.
“There’s relay failure, the pins wear out, the housing, the contacts wear out, the carbons wear out, the car switch — same thing,” he said. “The traveling cables, they get brittle over years. The door locks, door contacts — everything wears out. They’re opened a million times. The machines have made five million trips if you think about it. What do we make now that runs for a hundred years?”
At Mr. Rivera’s building, Mr. Mehl, the manager, said he did not foresee the elevators getting replaced anytime soon. This cheers Mr. Rivera, who has not lost enthusiasm for his job at an age when most men are retired or dead. “I love it,” he said, “because I go up and down. I don’t go only down. I’ve been doing it for 35 years. Oh, yes. That’s why I’m still here.”
Mr. Rivera switches elevators halfway through his shift. After lunch, the mail comes and he brings it down the basement to sort it. He is continually interrupted — every time someone buzzes, he has to run back upstairs. This time of year, the process can take hours. “Garbage, garbage, this is all garbage,” Mr. Rivera murmured as he filled cubbyholes with holiday catalogs.
At 3 p.m., the afternoon elevator man, Felix Mina, came on to spell Mr. Rivera and finish the mail. After Mr. Rivera changed out of his uniform, Mr. Mina brought him back up. “Until tomorrow,” he said. “Bye, Ramon.” Mr. Mina closed the elevator door. From within came the sound of the scissor gate creaking and then clicking into place, and the car descending.
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