I Went Door to Door in Search of Ancient Elevators in New York City

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Some stories take so long that by the time you finish, the world has changed.

This one — now finally told — begins in 1971, when a wide-eyed first-grader beheld the elevator at his school in Brooklyn. The elevator was so old it didn’t have push buttons. Instead, the all-powerful Elevator Man would push a handle to the right or the left to make the elevator go up and down.

The boy grew up to have a daughter who studied dance at the American Ballet Theater in Manhattan. That building still had an old-fashioned manual elevator too, and an operator to run it. This reminded the man of his boyhood fascination.

The man is my boss, Wendell Jamieson, the Metro editor. One day, in approximately 2013, he asked me, “Andy, why don’t you write a story about old manual elevators and elevator men?”

Sure, I said. Somehow, three years went by. In the spring of 2016, I started making calls. The union that represents doormen and elevator men introduced me to a man named Rene Richard who had been running a manual elevator in a textile building in the garment district for 40 years. Its days were numbered, and he did not know of any others left in the neighborhood.

“It’s the last of the Mohicans,” he said as we rode up and down. “Soon we will be extinct.”

I needed to find out if there were other manual elevators in other parts of the city. I contacted the city Buildings Department and was surprised to receive a spreadsheet labeled “Manual Passenger Elevators” that had more than 500 buildings on it. “It’s quite an extensive list,” the spokesman wrote.

Except that it was no good. I visited 87 buildings on the list. More than three-quarters of them had changed over to push-button elevators — many of them decades ago. Doormen shook their heads at me. But some of them knew about other manual elevators that weren’t on the city list. I reached out to real estate brokers. They knew of a bunch more.

I started making a map. I noticed high concentrations of manual-elevator buildings on the fanciest stretches of Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue on the Upper East Side and some streets on the Upper West Side. For several days, I went door to door uptown, hunting, and I learned some interesting things about the differences between neighborhoods.

On the Upper West Side, if you ask the doorman if they have an old manual elevator, he will invite you in to see it and maybe even give you a ride. On prime stretches of the Upper East Side, I was turned away more often than not, sometimes rudely. The very rich are different. So are their doormen.

Other assignments intervened. Another year or so went by. “How about that elevator story?” a different editor said. I returned to the trail. I got to ride in the old elevator at my boss’s old school (which is still in operation) and in many others.

But Mr. Richard’s building had gone push-button. He had been shifted to a freight elevator in back.

It turns out, though, that there is another building with manual elevators left in the garment district, at least for now. It is a block away from Mr. Richard’s, at 230 West 39th Street, right around the corner from my office.

The rooftop motor room is a steampunk paradise. Big green sparks flash from the contact board when the elevator starts and stops. An iron gadget driven by centrifugal force called a fly ball governor limits the speed.

But the 91-year-old system is on its last legs. The building’s owner, Charlie Hoppenstein, has spent $35,000 this year on maintenance. The company that fixes his elevators is pushing him to tear them out. He could pay for new elevators with what he’d save on elevator-man salaries after a few years.

Two generations of the same family have been running the elevators in the building since the early 1970s. Mr. Hoppenstein feels loyalty to them. And he feels an inexplicable obligation to his old elevators.

“Ultimately, I could replace them,” he said. “But I don’t want to.”