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. board parts
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.
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