Aaron and I visited Grace Church for Fujianese on Allen Street (now subtitled with the sign “Street of Immigrants”) in the East Village. The sanctuary was practical and unadorned; white walls and two screens for the projected hymnal lyrics. We noticed that most of the church goers were single and subdued. Perhaps this is because we went to the 9am service.
Here’s an article about the church by Kenneth Guest published in 2004:
A Chinatown church offers Fujianese immigrants spiritual salvation–and begins to contemplate their earthly troubles.
God saved Liu Zhu’en’s life. He was smuggled out of China to New York a decade ago, at age 19–an ordeal that gained him $24,000 of debt and a painful disorder in his legs from the beatings he got when he didn’t pay quickly enough. “It was so bad I started to think about how to kill myself,” he says of his early days here. But then Jesus came into his life.
“I had been living next to the Church of Grace on Allen Street. The people there had been helping me, sometimes paying my medical bills, visiting me in the hospital,” Liu explains. “One day, when the pain was so bad I didn’t know what to do, I went to the church and prayed. I gave my life to Jesus. I think that’s when things started to turn around.” The pain continued, but Liu shouldered it better, managing to work sporadically. He quit thinking about suicide and embraced his new American life.
Every week, Chinatown’s Church of Grace, as well as the smaller New York House Church, is filled with hundreds of people like the young Liu: Fuzhounese immigrants who arrive here in isolation and land at the bottom of Chinatown’s economic ladder, but who find both material and emotional support inside a massive and growing informal network of conservative Protestants.
In the 1990s, Chinese immigrants ranked third among New York City’s new arrivals. Unlike previous waves of Chinese immigration–which came largely from the Guangdong province and its capital city, Guangzhou, known as Canton in those days–this mass migration stemmed primarily from the towns around a southeastern port city called Fuzhou. The word among the Fuzhounese is that some 300,000 immigrants from the region now make their home in the United States, with 60,000 to 70,000 in New York City at any given time. These estimated figures are difficult to corroborate. No comprehensive demographic survey exists. Nor is it clear one could ever be accurate, given the transience of the community’s large population of undocumented workers.
For most Fuzhounese immigrants, Chinatown is the first stop in America. Here they connect with family, housing and jobs. But while Chinatown is a gateway, for many Fuzhounese it is also a trap, an ethnic enclave manufactured by the neighborhood’s Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking economic and political elites to keep them isolated and easy to exploit.
In April 1992, the Church of Grace bought an old bathhouse on Allen Street at a public land auction. Opened at the turn of the century to serve Jewish and Italian immigrants who lived in tenements without hot water or bathing facilities, the bathhouse was originally built as part of an effort to better the moral character of immigrants by improving their hygiene. Ninety years later, it was reborn as a spiritual center to ease this latest group of migrants’ path to eternal salvation.
From its beginning, the Church of Grace has worshipped in Fuzhounese. In the 1950s, the Chinese government introduced Mandarin as the dialect of instruction in the public schools and national media. But for rural Chinese–and most Fuzhounese fit that category–Mandarin is just a second or third language learned after their local one. So here, board meetings are conducted in Fuzhounese, as is most informal conversation. It is often the only language older members speak. In a neighborhood dominated by Cantonese and Mandarin speakers, this common language is a significant unifying factor, and as a result the Church of Grace has established a distinct identity as “the Fuzhounese church.”
The church’s physical design reflects rural Protestant churches everywhere in China: simple and unadorned. The pews are hand hewn of plain wood, varnished and cushionless. The stark white walls deliberately lack ornamentation.
At 11 a.m., as the 90-minute service begins, the sanctuary is packed with 350 people. Another 60 sit on folding chairs in the foyer watching the service on closed-circuit television, as do another 70 in the church’s social hall upstairs. In the basement, three tiny Sunday School classes squeeze in nearly 50 children. The mailing list has well over 2,000 names, with addresses all over the country, including some detention centers. The Fuzhounese population is highly transient and attendance reflects this fact–pews are consistently filled, but participants change from week to week.
Globalization theorists would call the Church of Grace and the New York House Church “nodes of access”–links to a web of social and economic relations that spread from this New York entry point throughout the city, across the country, and eventually back to China.
The foyer of the Church of Grace is for its members a place of transition between one reality and another. Outside they are derided as uncultured “country bumpkins,” or tubaozi; inside they celebrate the common heritage of an exploring people. Outside they are itinerant workers moving from city to city; inside they find a place for reconnection. Outside they are one step from imprisonment and deportation; inside they are exhorted to remember that while a U.S. green card would be nice, only God’s green card will get them into heaven.
Over bowls of noodles served after worship, conversations roar with news of home, jobs and places to live. A member of the Board of Deacons passes along a videotape from Fuzhou soliciting funds from overseas compatriots for his church. A group of college students meets in a corner to discuss their upcoming exams. These diffuse interactions create the feel of a community center, and they’re the source of the support people like Liu find here.
In the fall of 1999, a deacon at the church’s Brooklyn branch proposed to the board a way to harness this informal network’s potential for civic engagement: create the Church of Grace Social Service Corporation. He suggested the congregation open its own company, employ members for fair wages working under decent conditions, and attach a day-care center for children whose parents would otherwise be forced to send them back to China. Complete silence filled the room when the deacon finished speaking.
Officially and publicly, the church rarely addresses the earthly problems its members confront. Things like grinding work conditions, mental illness and oppressive indebtedness do make the pages of the church newsletter, but they typically serve as background for testimonials of miraculous healing or exhortations to pray for relief. The church may be the focal point for an extensive informal network of mutual assistance, but the congregation provides few formal services to address the community’s needs.
Fuzhounese Protestantism is theologically conservative, emphasizing faith, not good works, and personal, not collective, salvation. Church leaders focus on the power of the Holy Spirit and the love of God to comfort people in their distress. As one older female deacon says: “Jesus has taken my bitter life and given me rest and comfort in my sadness.” This is a place primarily concerned about the soul, not the body.
Moreover, in China the official religious domain is limited to personal devotion and congregational activities focused on piety; domains of power and social action are reserved for the state. Having grown up in that environment, most church leaders have little experience enacting social service programs, and therefore have been reluctant to break new ground with their seemingly fragile congregation.
But a couple of years ago, Rev. Chen Zhaoqing took over as senior pastor. Born in Malaysia, he’s a child of the Fuzhounese diaspora who came to the U.S. as a missionary to Chinese college students in Texas. He envisions a more civically engaged church in Chinatown, and has fired up a scattershot of programs.
He’s started an early Sunday, English-language service–distinctly lacking in Fuzhou flavor–that’s attended primarily by recent immigrants wishing to hear English. There are also weekly English-as-a-Second-Language classes. A bulletin board for job postings and apartment listings has been revived, after succumbing several years earlier to members’ complaints that “a church should not be an employment agency.” Representatives of a neighborhood women’s health program occasionally set up a table in the lobby to schedule consultations on issues ranging from HIV testing to nutrition.
These developments are not the radical organizational response suggested and dismissed a few years ago. But they do reflect a slow expansion of the church’s narrow personal evangelism into a broader civic one, combining public concerns with individual salvation. “Things are changing here,” Rev. Chen explains. “We don’t know how to address all these needs, but we are beginning to try.”
Kenneth J. Guest is the author of God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community. This essay is excerpted from his book.
Pearl Studios NYC
500 8th Avenue #412
(between 35th and 36th Streets)
New York NY 10018
Free and open to the public
Limited seating – please RSVP
Email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu or call (212) 992-9653
About the Show
Prompted by the real-life story of Ming Kuang Chen, Stuck Elevator is an operatic solo performance about a Chinese restaurant deliveryman trapped in an elevator for three days.
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Music by Byron Au Yong
Words by Aaron Jafferis
Director David Herskovits
Music Director Alden Terry
Violinist Cynthia Marcus
Cellist/Pianist Alden Terry
Percussionist James Mack
Sound Designer Kate Marvin
Stage/Production Manager Laura Wilson
Assistant Director John Kurzynowski
The new Museum of Chinese in America holds its grand opening tonight. I think fondly of their new home designed by Maya Lin. Last Friday, the Stuck Elevator Workshop Reading was held in MoCA’s contemporary gallery space which features the Here and Now: Chinese Artists in New York exhibition.
Stuck Elevator musicians rehearsed in front of Xu Bing’s (!) work while construction workers hammered together shelves in the adjacent room and the alarm-system flashed lights and bells. During the rehearsal I kept repeating “It Could Be Worse,” one of the songs from the show, to myself.
The Workshop Reading hosted by MoCA and the A/P/A Institute later that night was followed by a lively feedback session moderated by Jack Tchen. Musician/Scholar Cynthia Wang wrote insightful impressions of the reading on her blog.
Steven, Cynthia, and Alden rehearse
The week-long whirlwind of composing, rehearsing, and performing was fantastic thanks to a dedicated team. Aaron and I worked with director Tamilla Woodard, music director/cellist Alden Terry, performer Steven Eng, violinist Cynthia Marcus and percussionist Paul Kikuchi. Helping with logistics were stage/production manager Edna Lee Figueroa, and numerous A/P/A Institute staff that included Laura Chen-Schultz, Alexandra Chang, and Ruby Gomez. A special thanks goes out to the MoCA staff who allowed us to have the Stuck Elevator reading a few days before the momentous opening tonight. MoCA’s Beatrice Chen and Cynthia Lee rock.
Now, I’m back in Seattle picking pears, taking care of the chickens, weeding my vegetable patch, teaching at Cornish, composing for Whim W’him’s event this October, and thinking of the revisions for the November Stuck Elevator readings.
Gordon, 3, would not look his parents in the eyes, and refused to call them Mom and Dad. He erupted in tantrums and sometimes cried nonstop for half an hour.
“We did not know why,” said his mother, Winnie Liu, recalling the desperation that sent them to a neurologist to check Gordon for autism, and to a hospital that referred them to Butterflies, a mental health program for very young children on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Finally they learned the reason for their child’s distress — and the reason social service agencies that help families from China are facing a sharp rise in such developmental problems.
Like thousands of other Chinese immigrants responding to financial and cultural pressures, Ms. Liu and her husband, Tim Fang, had sent Gordon to live with his grandparents, thousands of miles away in Fujian Province, a few months after his birth in New York. Working long hours in the restaurant business, they had not brought him back to the United States until he was old enough to attend all-day public preschool.
And now he saw them as strangers who had stolen him away to a strange land.
“The children that have that experience come back with tremendous needs,” said Nina Piros, director of early childhood programs at University Settlement, a nonprofit agency that estimates that 400 of the 1,000 children served by its Butterflies program are returnees from China. “They come here and they’re totally traumatized.”
Some act out in frightening and confusing ways, she said, banging their heads on walls, refusing to speak, or wandering aimlessly in the classroom. These signs of extreme trauma have often been misunderstood as symptoms of autism. But they are the marks of the emotional dislocations these young children have endured.
Less severely affected youngsters are helped through supportive workshops for their teachers and parents. But about two dozen in the Butterflies program need the kind of intensive therapy that eventually helped Gordon and his parents bond, said Andrea D. Bennett, director of Butterflies, which was started three years ago with money from the City Council.
The phenomenon of American-born children who spend their infancy in China has been known for years to social workers, who say it is widespread and worrying. About 8,000 Chinese-born women gave birth in New York last year, so the number of children at risk is substantial, according to the Chinese-American Planning Council, a social service agency that hopes to get a grant to educate parents about the pitfalls of the practice and help them find alternatives.
But no one tracks the numbers, and the issue has only recently seized the attention of early-childhood researchers like Yvonne Bohr, a clinical psychologist at York University in Toronto, who calls such children “satellite babies.”
Their repeatedly disrupted attachments to family members “could potentially add up to a mental health crisis for some immigrant communities,” Dr. Bohr wrote in an article in May in The Infant Mental Health Journal. She cited classic research like the work of Anna Freud, who found that young children evacuated during the London blitz were so damaged by separation from their parents that they would have been better off at home, in danger of falling bombs.
Dr. Bohr, who is undertaking a longitudinal study of families with satellite babies, cautions that the older research was shaped by Western values and expectations. Chinese parents, including university-educated professionals she has studied, are often influenced by cultural traditions: an emphasis on self-sacrifice for the good of the family, a belief that grandparents are the best caretakers, and a desire to ground children in their heritage.
Sending babies back to grandparents is also done in some South Asian communities, she said.
But Amanda Peck, a spokeswoman for University Settlement, which has been serving newcomers to the Lower East Side since 1886, said that while family separations are a feature of migration in many ethnic groups, the satellite-baby phenomenon seems rare outside the Chinese community.
Some children are better able to adapt, whether because of natural resilience, more supportive parenting or the age at which disruptions occurred. Even in severe cases like Gordon’s, the Butterflies program has had success in overcoming the worst consequences of separation with therapeutic play and support for parent and child, said Victoria Chiu, its bilingual therapist.
But for many children, new separations are in store even after they return to the United States. In one typical case, parents migrated to work in a Chinese restaurant in South Carolina, taking a school-age child along, but leaving a baby in China and a 3-year-old with grandparents in New York.
“The 3-year-old, he wouldn’t even smile,” Ms. Chiu said. “When he sat in circle time, his whole little body was just slumped.”
Gordon, now 7, keeps up with his second-grade classmates and has learned to control his temper, said his parents, who own Wild Ginger, a restaurant on Broome Street. In imperfect but fluent English, his mother recounted the hard climb to that happy resolution, and revisited the scene of major turning points: a tiny playroom under the eaves of the old settlement house, where a dollhouse and a big plush dog played a role in healing her son.
Dressed as a superhero, Gordon would often rescue the dog from a pretend fire in the dollhouse, saving him from “the bad guys,” as Ms. Chiu and his mother played along.
“I was the bad lady,” Gordon’s mother, 31, recalled ruefully. “Then the play changed, and he tried to save Mom from the bad guy.”
The therapist explained: “He was trying to find mastery over things he had no control over. We started introducing scenarios to help him develop trust in his parents’ authority over his life.”
Ms. Liu, who was 17 when she immigrated to New York on a green card sponsored by her father, pressed a hand to her heart. “This wonderful therapist, this program, help us read the child’s mind,” she said. “Now he hug me, and he say ‘Mommy’ sometimes.”
Still, Gordon remains more withdrawn than typical 7-year-olds. Ms. Liu said she struggles with guilt and regret.
“I advise all Chinese families, do not send your kids away, no matter how hard, because that loss cannot be made up,” she said. “Money is not so important. Nothing can make up for the sensation of love between parents and children.”
The shuttling of babies first caught public attention in New York a decade ago, when women workers from Fujian Province, deep in debt to the “snakeheads” who had smuggled them into the country, had little choice but to send their infants back to their extended families.
Typically, such children returned at school age. Their tough adjustment to the change in language, customs and parental discipline was generally likened to the problems of other immigrant children, who must often cope with long-delayed reunions after being left behind for years.
Now, however, because of the expansion of free full-day preschool in recent years, satellite babies return and start classes as young as 2 years, 9 months.
Their parents, including many lawful permanent residents and citizens like Gordon’s mother, assume that the children will adjust more easily because they are so young. But early childhood is the crucial time for learning to form attachments and feel empathy, and serious disruptions carry lifelong consequences, psychologists say, including higher rates of depression and dysfunction.
Many families are unaware of the potential psychological damage, said Hong Shing Lee, chief operating officer of the Asian-American Federation of New York.
That was the case for the family of Alisa Chen, now 4. Alisa was 6 months old when her mother, Qiao Yuni Chen, a waitress unable to afford day care, took her to her grandmother in China. When Mrs. Chen returned more than a year later to visit — and to leave Alisa’s baby sister, Angie — she was heartbroken by Alisa’s rejection. Only in the last two weeks of a three-month stay was Alisa willing to sleep at her mother’s side.
Alisa started preschool at University Settlement in August, only a week after arriving in New York; two months later, teachers referred her to Butterflies.
“She seemed kind of lost, not picking up English, withdrawing from her peers,” Ms. Chiu recalled. “She seemed anxious that her mom wouldn’t pick her up.” Another problem was the mother’s expectations: The only toy in their home was a letter board more appropriate for a 6-year-old than for a child turning 4.
Mrs. Chen, whose husband is now in the Army in South Carolina, threw herself into becoming a more supportive parent, Ms. Chiu said. Though she spoke little English, she phonetically memorized songs like “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” At a 99-cent store, the therapist helped her pick playthings that would allow her daughter to express herself.
The payoff was obvious when the preschooler returned from a class trip to the Bronx Zoo one recent afternoon. Pigtails bouncing, her smile electric with joy, Alisa threw herself into her mother’s arms. Ms. Chiu beamed.
Next month, Alisa’s little sister arrives from China to begin Head Start.
Thanks for your interest. The September Workshop Performance has been cast. Stay tuned for the Kick-Off on September 17, at Casa Italiana at NYU and the musical reading on September 18, 7:30pm, at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York’s Chinatown.
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Stuck Elevator is an operatic solo performance by composer Byron Au Yong and librettist Aaron Jafferis, 2009-2010 Artists-in-Residence at the A/P/A Institute at NYU. It is scored for male voice accompanied by fiddle, cello, and scrap metal percussion.
Show Synopsis
Prompted by the real-life story of Ming Kuang Chen, Stuck Elevator is an operatic solo performance about a Chinese restaurant delivery man trapped in an elevator for three days. Suspended between the upward mobility of the American dream and the downward plunge into an empty abyss, Stuck Elevator explores the places between Refuge/Prison, Freedom/Safety and Voice/Silence for an undocumented immigrant in America.
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Stuck Elevator is a project of Creative Capital. In addition, the development of Stuck Elevator has received support from 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Asian & Pacific Islander/Artist Presenting Initiative (API/2). Excerpts from Stuck Elevator have been presented in Hand2Mouth’s 2009 Risk/RewardNew Performance Festival and On the Boards’ 2009 NW New Works Festival.
The book Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream is released next week. It already has 21 reviews on Amazon.com. I look forward to reading author Patrick Radden Keefe’s perspective on undocumented Chinese immigrants as Aaron and I continue work on Stuck Elevator.
Last Saturday, percussionist/instrument builder Paul Kikuchi and I (Byron) performed Kuang in a Stuck Elevator excerpt as part of Hand2Mouth’s Risk/Reward New Performance Festival at the Imago Theatre in Portland. The sound cues were totally messed up, leaving Paul and I holding the show together while gritting our teeth. When Kuang opens the fortune cookie at the end of the excerpt, I breathed a sigh of release glad to be finished with the ordeal.
This is what the fortune read: “Your mind will make your body rich.”
My mind stayed focused while my body tensed during this difficult performance. Even though I was forced to sing over the wrong recordings, silently wondering how to tell the tech director and sound board operator to turn off the audio, the Portland audience was highly responsive.
The Risk/Reward Festival has a convivial feel and the larger stage helped the sense of isolation for this excerpt. Thanks to Hand2Mouth for hosting this version of Stuck Elevator and to Paul for being my onstage comrade as we were trapped performing in technical difficulties.
From June 5-8, I (Byron) performed Kuang in a Stuck Elevator excerpt. On each night, my co-star — the fortune cookie — had his own two cents, but being a cookie with a broken mouth, people in the audience didn’t know what he had to say.
Here is what the fortunes said:
Dress Rehearsal Thursday Night
Things in life should be simple rather than complex.
Opening Night (the most emotional for Kuang missing his wife and son)
You are domestically inclined and will be happily married.
Saturday Night (when cookie fell from my hands and cracked)
Your day shall go well tomorrow.
Closing Night (when I held on extra tight to the cookie)
You will be unusually successful in business.
Thanks to On the Boards staff, crew, and audience, the Studio Performances of the first weekend of the NW New Works Festival were sold-out. It was great to have a full house to explore Stuck Elevator material. Uncanny how much the cookie knows.
Excerpt from Seattlest review of NW New Works by Jeremy Barker
Byron Au Yong’s short opera about a Chinese delivery guy stuck in a New York elevator manages to be both moving and funny. Performed by Au Yong and musical collaborator Paul Kikuchi on a non-traditional set of percussion instruments, the action unfolds on a tiny platform representing an elevator, where Kuang has become trapped after delivering Chinese food to an apartment. Lacking good English and a proper work visa, as the hours unfold, Kuang is tortured by self-doubt and emasculation–he’s afraid of being mocked, afraid of being deported, and frightened of having to return to his wife a failure. But the painfully emotional parts are interspersed between comic bits, such as the hip hop song his bladder sings him in his sleep as he struggles not to piss himself.
Aaron Jafferis and I will be Artists-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University. Aaron and I have been working on Stuck Elevator, an operatic solo performance about the Chinese delivery man who was trapped in a Bronx elevator for three days. I am excited to workshop this super-heroic stationary journey with A/P/A.
In New York, A/P/A greats Laura and Alex took me to the Chen Dance Center and Museum of Chinese in America. At CDC, H.T. wowed us with his performing carp and intimate venue. The black box theatre was surprisingly quiet given that it was in New York’s Chinatown. I look forward to interacting with the audience during our workshop performances about an undocumented Chinese immigrant from New York.
Cynthia and Beatrice at MoCA discussed programming possibilities in the new Museum designed by Maya Lin. Touring the space under construction was phenomenal. Surrounded by glass, concrete, steel, and wood is a central courtyard with natural light. The walls of the courtyard are the original brick from the former garment worker’s building. Lin has created a place in New York’s Chinatown that reinterprets the meaning of the Chinese home in a city known for immigrants.
Aaron and I begin Stuck Elevator workshops this September.
Twice the immigration judge asked the woman’s name. Twice she gave it: Xiu Ping Jiang. But he chided her, a Chinese New Yorker, for answering his question before the court interpreter had translated it into Mandarin.
“Ma’am, we’re going to do this one more time, and then I’m going to treat you as though you were not here,” the immigration judge, Rex J. Ford, warned the woman last year at her first hearing in Pompano Beach, Fla. He threatened to issue an order of deportation that would say she had failed to show up.
She was a waitress with no criminal record, no lawyer and a history of attempted suicide. Her reply to the judge’s threat, captured by the court transcript, was in imperfect English. “Sir, I not — cannot go home,” she said, referring to China, which her family says she fled in 1995 after being forcibly sterilized at 20. “If I die, I die America.”
The judge moved on. “The respondent, after proper notice, has failed to appear,” he said for the record. And as she declared, “I’m going to die now,” he entered an order deporting her to China, and sent her back to the Glades County immigration jail.
That exchange, and her bleak experience in the immigration enforcement system, have come to light only through a fluke. Ms. Jiang happens to bear the same name as the ex-wife of Jiverly Wong, the United States citizen from Vietnam who fatally shot 13 people in April at an immigration services center in Binghamton, N.Y. As reporters tried to find the ex-wife, a database search for her name turned up court records about Ms. Jiang, the waitress.
Now 35, she has spent more than a year in jail, often in solitary confinement, sinking deeper into the mental illness that makes it impossible for her either to fight deportation or to obtain the travel documents needed to make it happen, according to a pending habeas corpus petition that seeks her release. It contends that she is suicidal, emaciated and deprived of proper medical treatment.
Had she been the Xiu Ping Jiang linked to a mass killer, her story would have made instant news around the world. Instead, she is a kind of Internet-era doppelganger, lost in one of the dark places of immigration law, where the only life at stake may be her own.
“I’m afraid my sister will commit suicide in the detention,” said her older sister, Yun, 37, who found Ms. Jiang too ill to recognize her when she visited the jail in February.
Ms. Jiang’s journey — from a village in China to restaurants in Brooklyn to a bare jail cell in South Florida in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — illustrates the vulnerability of the mentally ill in the immigration system, advocates say.
“It’s a really stark, really dire issue, and it’s a growing problem,” said Sunita Patel, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York who is part of an international working group of legal advocates and mental health providers seeking more protective rules. No one keeps count of such cases, but she added that “with all these enforcement measures being put into place by ICE, more and more people with mental illness are being put into the detention system. And sometimes these people disappear.”
Federal immigration officials said they could not comment on an individual case. But Elaine Komis, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration courts, said there were no rules for determining competency in deportation proceedings, and no way to ensure representation for a mentally ill person facing deportation.
“There is no right to government-paid representation in immigration court,” Ms. Komis said in a statement, “so no attorney is appointed when a respondent is believed to be incompetent.”
The nation’s immigration detention practices are under a comprehensive review ordered by Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said a spokesman for the agency, Richard Rocha, adding, “ICE recognizes the need to address mental health issues among its detainees.”
The exact nature of Ms. Jiang’s illness is unknown, and immigration authorities would not release her medical records, even to her lawyers, saying she had refused to sign a privacy release. Her two sisters, who live in New York, describe her as a sweet, quiet woman whose mind broke under the strain of life as an illegal immigrant seeking asylum.
She was traveling to Florida to start a job at a Chinese restaurant in December 2007 when immigration agents arrested her at a Greyhound bus station in West Palm Beach on suspicion that she was in the country without a visa.
She was luckier than many mentally ill detainees. After Judge Ford issued an order of deportation in January 2008, Ms. Jiang’s older sister, now a United States citizen, hired a lawyer who managed to have it overturned by the Board of Immigration Appeals last May. But Ms. Jiang had to face the same judge in July, and by then, after half a year in jail, her symptoms of mental illness had become so severe that she was unable or unwilling to communicate with the lawyer. He withdrew from the case.
She was on her own at a November hearing before a second immigration judge, Scott G. Alexander, who again ordered her deported and again returned her to jail, after noting that a government psychiatrist had deemed her competent to participate in the hearing. The record shows that she sat through the hearing in silence, her arms folded, her eyes downcast.
In February, Ms. Jiang’s sisters — one a waitress, one a cashier — found Theodore Cox, a New York immigration lawyer, who took the case without fee. So far, he and his associate, Andrew Wong, have not had much success with their emergency habeas petition, filed in March in federal court in Fort Myers, Fla.
In the last dozen years, immigration laws have sharply narrowed the grounds for federal court review of such cases, and a federal magistrate judge directed Ms. Jiang’s lawyers to remove all allegations concerning her arrest, medical care, conditions of confinement and the denial of opportunity to apply for asylum protection at her hearing. Their motion urging reconsideration has not been answered.
The one issue the court seems prepared to review is whether Ms. Jiang is being unconstitutionally subjected to indefinite detention, defined under a 2001 Supreme Court decision as more than six months. But the six-month clock begins to run only after the final order of removal, which was in November 2008 in Ms. Jiang’s case. And a deportation officer stopped the clock in January, the lawyers said, because Ms. Jiang would not speak with immigration agents seeking a travel document for her.
Ms. Jiang goes without eating for days, or vomits after meals for fear of poison; she mumbles to herself and tears up letters from her family, the petition says. While her risk of dying in detention seems to grow each day, her sisters say, they also fear that she will die if she were deported to China, since nobody there is able to take care of her.
“To save her, I would change places with my sister,” her sister Yun proposed in an interview at Mr. Cox’s law office, speaking through a translator. “Take me to detention.”
In their home village in Fujian Province, in southeastern China, the sisters said, Ms. Jiang was married under age. She hid in their mother’s house when she was pregnant with her second son, they said, because under China’s one-child policy, the village government would have forced her to have an abortion.
“She did not deliver in a hospital, and she almost died,” said the younger sister, Yu, 33, the first to emigrate. A few days after the birth, she added, officials found Ms. Jiang, sterilized her and imposed a heavy fine. Later, divorced and desperate, Ms. Jiang borrowed the equivalent of $35,000 to be smuggled by boat to the United States, hoping to find political asylum and bring over the young sons she left with their grandmother.
But grueling months at sea left her emotionally fragile, and in the summer of 1997, about a year after her arrival, she became so despondent about her separation from her children, and the burden of her debts, that she tried to kill herself by drinking bleach, her sisters said. The police took her to Bellevue Hospital Center.
“She was afraid of being arrested, so the next day she ran away,” Yu recalled.
At times over the next decade Ms. Jiang seemed better, as she moved from work in Manhattan garment factories to waitress jobs in Chinese restaurants across the country. But an effort to bring her younger son into the United States through Canada when he was 8 or 9 backfired: he was caught by Canadian officials and placed in foster care.
“He intended to join up with her,” the younger sister said of the boy, now 16. “Now it’s impossible, because he’s being adopted.”
By the winter of 2007, Ms. Jiang’s mental illness had cost her many jobs, the sisters said, but as a favor, some of their former employers would still hire her. She had lost a job in Alabama and was on her way to another in Florida when immigration agents stopped her.
One of the mysteries of Ms. Jiang’s life remains a brief marriage in Des Moines to a Vietnamese man. Her sisters said the family had never even learned his name because she was ashamed to talk about the episode. When they learned from a reporter in April that a woman named Xiu Ping Jiang had been married to the Binghamton gunman, they were seized by doubt: Could this have been their sister’s Vietnamese husband?
They made a flurry of phone calls, then raced through Chinatown streets in the rain to show a photo of the killer to Ms. Jiang’s former boss from Des Moines, who was visiting New York. But he took one look and said with finality, “That’s not him.”
By then, the sisters seemed to have been hoping for a different verdict, for a link that could suddenly turn the world’s gaze to their Xiu Ping Jiang — long enough, at least, to save her from the dark.
Stuart Dempster photographed this sign at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma.
He writes “It leads one to all kinds of possibilities, and it seems a perfect adjunct to your elevator piece. By the time the man stuck in your elevator (piece!) for several hours or day or two or whatever it was, I suspect that the elevator, indeed, would have become a restroom elevator.”
Stuart sends this as Aaron, Paul, and I work on the bladder rap.
Aaron and I watched Golden Venture last night. It is a documentary about the container ship that landed in New York with nearly 300 Chinese. The work traced the lives of four of the survivors and also interviewed Americans in York, Pennsylvania who advocated on behalf of the undocumented immigrants the four years they were incarcerated after landing in the United States.
I was surprised that the Chinese from Fujian Province had to hike through the mountains to Bangkok, then board the deadly container ship. In Kenya, they picked up about 200 more Chinese who were stranded. Each person paid around $50,000 U.S. dollars for a “body space” on this boat. It looked like a 20th century slave ship.
Media sculptor Susie Lee has a new show called Shadow Playing at the Art Gym in Lake Oswego, south of Portland.
Projections of children play in the corners and run into the walls in this former gym with boarded windows are evocative and eerie. There is also a small room with children’s voices and pencil drawings all over the white walls.
Julie Custer and Teresa Redden have created a life-size Chinese take-out box as part of Mary Welch/Wayward Girl Productions’ Ashes to Ashes at the Chapel Performance Space. 20 coffins and music by Steve Peters fill the space.
This artwork inspires Aaron and me to continue exploring the ritual containers that go along with Chinese American food. More to come in 2009.
A 5-year-old Brooklyn boy fell 10 stories down an elevator shaft to his death on Tuesday in a public housing complex where residents had complained of recurring problems with the elevators and renovations had been delayed because of federal cutbacks.
The police said the boy, Jacob Neuman, 5, was in an elevator with his 8-year-old brother at 70 Clymer Street in South Williamsburg just before 9:00 a.m. when the elevator became lodged between the 10th and 11th floors. Jacob, a student at a Talmudic academy, was on his way to classes when he tried to escape through the opened elevator door by jumping to the 10th floor, the police said, but lost his footing and fell to the bottom of the shaft.
The boy was taken to Brooklyn Hospital Center, where he was pronounced dead at 9:30 a.m., said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office.
Jacob was the youngest of five children, three girls and two boys. The family lives on the 11th floor of the building, which is part of the Taylor-Wythe apartment complex, owned and overseen by the New York City Housing Authority.
The funeral, held nearby at the Yereim Orthodox Chapel at 93 Broadway soon afterward, was attended by several hundred men, dressed in the traditional black garb of the Hasidic community, and by women with head coverings. Jacob’s father, Chaim, delivered a eulogy, saying in Yiddish, “We are parting, but we will never forget you.”
Jacob’s mother and sisters clutched their faces in grief and had to be helped into chairs on the sidewalk near the end of the service.
In interviews at the complex, residents of the 12-story building said there had been repeated problems with the elevators.
“A lot of times they have become stuck,” said Doris Acosta, who lives on the second floor. “Sometimes they don’t close or don’t open,” she said. “Like when we try to close the door it stays open, and sometimes when we are trying to press the elevator button it doesn’t move. It has happened a lot of times.”
Akive Mendelowitz, 56, who has lived on the 11th floor of the building for 21 years, said he had often called 311 for help.
“This morning — it was like I would say 5:30 — I wanted to go down, and the elevator did not stop,” he said in a telephone interview. Instead, he had to walk down a few floors to catch the elevator. “I needed to go to the 10th floor and then 9th floor,” he said.
“And then this happens,” he said.
The building’s elevators were rated “unsatisfactory” in 17 of 21 inspections the housing authority conducted from 2004 through 2007, city records show, but authority officials said most of those involved minor matters like broken light bulbs or oil leaking from the elevator motor. The authority did not find any problems it considered hazardous, said Howard Marder, an authority spokesman.
The building’s two elevators were to have been modernized in 2004, but those projects were twice delayed because of cuts in federal aid, housing authority officials said.
According to City Department of Buildings records, someone complained on Jan. 21 this year that one of the building’s elevators became stuck for about an hour.
A housing authority official said five operational failures were reported in the last six months in the elevator where Jacob fell. According to the buildings department Web site, the last recorded inspection of the elevators at that address was on Oct. 3, 2007.
A housing authority statement said that the circumstances were under review by city agencies.
David Yassky, the city councilman who represents the neighborhood, said in a statement that the housing authority assured him that it was “working to get to the bottom” of Jacob’s death. The Police Department was also investigating.
Mr. Yassky said in a telephone interview that he had not been aware of elevator problems at the building but he was aware of general complaints at the complex, which was completed in 1974. “Public housing and the city housing authority has been chronically underfunded for years, and the result of that neglect is just becoming more and more evident,” he said. “There are elevators that don’t work and doors that are chronically broken. This is what happens when you let buildings fall apart through neglect.”
“This is a tragedy and a very personal thing that happened today,” he said.
Israel Rosenberg, 30, the president of the tenants’ association at the complex, said he had received complaints from residents two weeks ago about the elevator from which Jacob fell. “They’re a danger,” he said. “They’ve been a danger. We complain but nothing is ever done.”
So common is the sound of the emergency alarm at 70 Clymer Street that when Tanya Johnson, a resident, heard it on Tuesday, she assumed that it was just another person stuck. It was not until later while watching the news that she knew it concerned a graver emergency.
“I heard the cries, I heard the hollers,” she said. “I heard him calling his brother’s name. I heard the little boy. He was hysterical. I heard them pushing the button.”
Pessie Gelb, 37, a neighbor, said she saw Jacob’s brother after the accident. “He was saying, ‘I couldn’t grab my brother. I couldn’t grab my brother,’ ” she recalled.
Jacob was a student at the Central United Talmudic Academy. The president of the United Jewish Organization, Rabbi David Niederman, said some of Jacob’s siblings came home from summer camp upstate when they learned of his death.
At the funeral, Rabbi Mendel Teitelbaum wept as he spoke. “This is not the nature of the world,” the rabbi said, “that young children should die before their parents and grandparents.”
The tiny coffin, draped in a black cloth with white trim, was carried down Broadway and placed in a minivan to be taken to a cemetery in New Brunswick, N.J.
Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, David Giambusso, Daryl Khan and Ray Rivera.
Up and Then Down
by Nick Paumgarten
The New Yorker
The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.
The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.
The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property. Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? friction? heat?—start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.
Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators. Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft. One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator. (The operator of the other one had stepped out for a cigarette.) By the time the car crashed into the buffer in the pit (a hydraulic truncheon designed to be a cushion of last resort), a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it, serving as a kind of spring. A pillow of air pressure, as the speeding car compressed the air in the shaft, may have helped ease the impact as well. Still, the landing was not soft. The car’s walls buckled, and steel debris tore up through the floor. It was the woman’s good fortune to be cowering in a corner when the car hit. She was severely injured but alive.
Traction elevators—the ones hanging from ropes, as opposed to dumbwaiters, or mining elevators, or those lifted by hydraulic pumps—are typically borne aloft by six or eight hoist cables, each of which, according to the national elevator-safety code (and the code determines all), is capable on its own of supporting the full load of the elevator plus twenty-five per cent more weight. Another line, the governor cable, is connected to a device that detects if the elevator car is descending at a rate twenty-five per cent faster than its maximum designed speed. If that happens, the device trips the safeties, bronze shoes that run along vertical rails in the shaft. These brakes are designed to stop the car quickly, but not so abruptly as to cause injury. They work. This is why free falling, at least, is so rare.
Still, elevator lore has its share of horrors: strandings, manglings, fires, drownings, decapitations. An estimated two hundred people were killed in elevators at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—some probably in free-fall plunges, but many by fire, smoke, or entrapment and subsequent structural collapse. The elevator industry likes to insist that, short of airplane rammings, most accidents are the result of human error, of passengers or workers doing things they should not. Trying to run in through closing doors is asking for trouble; so is climbing up into an elevator car, or down out of one, when it is stuck between floors, or letting a piece of equipment get lodged in the brake, as happened to a service elevator at 5 Times Square, in Manhattan, four years ago, causing the counterweight to plummet (the counterweight, which aids an elevator’s rise and slows its descent, is typically forty per cent heavier than an empty car) and the elevator to shoot up, at sixty miles an hour, into the beams at the top of the shaft, killing the attendant inside. Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.
Nonetheless, elevators are extraordinarily safe—far safer than cars, to say nothing of other forms of vertical transport. Escalators are scary. Statistics are elusive (“Nobody collects them,” Edward Donoghue, the managing director of the trade organization National Elevator Industry, said), but the claim, routinely advanced by elevator professionals, that elevators are ten times as safe as escalators seems to arise from fifteen-year-old numbers showing that, while there are roughly twenty times as many elevators as escalators, there are only a third more elevator accidents. An average of twenty-six people die in (or on) elevators in the United States every year, but most of these are people being paid to work on them. That may still seem like a lot, until you consider that that many die in automobiles every five hours. In New York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven billion elevator trips a year—thirty million every day—and yet hardly more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical attention. The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days. As the world urbanizes—every year, in developing countries, sixty million people move into cities—the numbers will go up, and up and down.
Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is energy-efficient—the counterweight does a great deal of the work, and the new systems these days regenerate electricity. The elevator is a hybrid, by design.
While anthems have been written to jet travel, locomotives, and the lure of the open road, the poetry of vertical transportation is scant. What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down? In “The Intuitionist,” Colson Whitehead’s novel about elevator inspectors, the conveyance itself is more conceit than thing; the plot concerns, among other things, the quest for a “black box,” a perfect elevator, but the nature of its perfection remains mysterious. Onscreen, there has been “The Shaft” (“Your next stop . . . is hell”), a movie about a deadly malfunctioning elevator system in a Manhattan tower, which had the misfortune of coming out the Friday before September 11th, and a scattering of inaccurate set pieces in action movies, such as “Speed.” (There are no ladders or lights in most shafts.) Movies and television programs, such as “Boston Legal” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” often rely on the elevator to bring characters together, as a kind of artificial enforcement of proximity and conversation. The brevity of the ride suits the need for a stretch of witty or portentous dialogue, for stolen kisses and furtive arguments. For some people, the elevator ride is a social life.
When filmmakers want to shoot an elevator scene, they will spin the elevator around, like a lazy Susan, so that the character can disembark into a different set. This trick captures something about an elevator ride—the way that it can feel like teleportation. You go in here and come out there, and you hardly consider that you have just raced up or down a vertiginous, pitch-black shaft. When you’re waiting for a ride, you don’t think that what lurks behind the outer doors is emptiness. Every so often, a door opens when it shouldn’t and someone steps into the void. This is worth keeping in mind.
People don’t like to ride in elevators or wait for them. Many people can’t even get in one, or would really rather not. “They’re not psychotic,” Jerilyn Ross, a cognitive-behavioral therapist in Washington and the president of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, said recently. “It’s just a misfiring of the fight-or-flight response.” Elevator phobia is a kind of claustrophobia, and as such the fear is as much of experiencing fear—of having a panic attack, in an enclosed space—as it is of the thing itself. One of Ross’s board members is David Hoberman, who produced the television series “Monk,” several episodes of which have touched on Detective Monk’s elevator phobia. “I have it,” Hoberman said recently. “It’s for real. I avoid elevators at all costs.” His least favorite are the ones in small doctors’-office buildings, in the Valley.
Hoberman has been undergoing behavioral elevator therapy for six months. His therapist began by taking him to the UCLA psychology department and locking him in a black box about the size of a phone booth. The first time, Hoberman lasted just five seconds. After four or five sessions, he could handle ten minutes. Before long, he and his therapist were riding elevators together, all over campus. He just built a house in Los Angeles, and it has an elevator, because his parents insisted that it will be useful to him when he grows old. “I will never ride in it,” Hoberman said. “I don’t have a fear of dying in an elevator, or of the elevator losing control — I have a fear of being stuck with my mind.”
Nicholas White wasn’t phobic, but he wasn’t exactly fond of elevators. When he was a boy, he and some other kids were trapped in one on their way down from a birthday party in an apartment building on Riverside Drive. After about twenty minutes, the Fire Department pulled the kids out, one at a time. In his recollection, he was the only person to ask the firemen whether the cables might snap.
White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)
After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette. It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach. Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes.
At a certain point, he decided to open the doors. He pried them apart and held them open with his foot. He was presented with a cinder-block wall on which, perfectly centered, were scrawled three “13”s—one in chalk, one in red paint, one in black. It was a dispiriting sight. He concluded that he must be on the thirteenth floor, and that, this being an express elevator, there was no egress from the shaft anywhere for many stories up or down. (Such a shaft is known as a blind hoistway.) He peered down through the crack between the wall and the sill of the elevator and saw that it was very dark. He could make out some light at the bottom. It looked far away. A breeze blew up the shaft.
He started to call out. “Hello?” He tried cupping his hand to his mouth and yelled out some more. “Help! Is there anybody there? I’m stuck in an elevator!” He kept at it for a while.
Until recently, one of New York City’s most notoriously dysfunctional elevator banks could be found at the Marriott Marquis hotel, a forty-nine-story convention mill in Times Square, built in the early eighties, where glass elevators are arrayed like petals around a stalk of concrete, in the center of a vast atrium. For years, visitors complained of waits of as much as twenty minutes.
One morning not long ago, I met James Fortune, the man who designed that elevator system, in the lobby of the Marriott. Fortune, an affable industrial engineer originally from Pasadena, can reasonably disavow responsibility for the hotel’s elevator failings; a decision to put the lobby on the eighth floor essentially doubled the amount of work the elevators had to do to get guests to their rooms. (“The building’s underelevatored,” he told me, with a grimace. “We did the best we could.”) Fortune is probably the world’s busiest and best-known elevator consultant, especially in the category of super-tall towers—buildings of more than a hundred stories—which are proliferating around the world, owing in large part to elevator solutions provided by men like Fortune. Elevator consultants come in various guises. Some make the bulk of their living by testifying in court in accident lawsuits. Others collaborate with architects and developers to handle the human traffic in big buildings. Fortune is one of those.
Four years ago, Fortune, who is sixty-six, retired as president of the pioneering elevator consulting firm Lerch Bates, but his retirement lasted just two weeks. He couldn’t resist the call of the elevator. He started a new firm, with headquarters in the relatively horizontal and un-elevatored city of Galveston, Texas—the majority of his work is overseas, especially in Asia and the Middle East, and the Houston airport is relatively central. In China alone, there are dozens of cities with a population of more than two million and, Fortune noted, “every city wants an iconic tower.” Persian Gulf cities like Doha and Dubai are a blizzard of elevator jobs.
Fortune has done the elevators, as they say, in five of the world’s ten tallest buildings. While at Lerch Bates, he did the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101 Tower, which has the fastest elevators in the world—rising at more than fifty-five feet per second, or about thirty-five miles an hour. The cars are pressurized, to prevent ear damage. He also did Burj Dubai, which, when it is completed, next year, will be the new tallest building, at least until it is supplanted by another one he is working on in the region. Burj Dubai will have forty-six elevators, including two double-deckers that will go straight to the top. (“I love double-decks,” Fortune said.) Adrian Smith, the building’s architect, has grand designs for towers reaching hundreds of stories—vertical cities—which would require a sophistication of conveyance not yet available. Two weeks ago, a Saudi prince announced a plan for a mile-high tower in a new city being built near Jidda—more than twice as tall as Burj Dubai. Fortune is bidding on that one, too. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mile-high, five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-story tower, called the Mile-High Illinois, in 1956, a kind of architectural manifesto of density. Wright allowed for seventy-six elevators—atomic-powered quintuple-deckers, rising at sixty miles an hour. “I ran the studies once,” Fortune said. “He wasn’t even close. He should’ve had two hundred and fifteen to two hundred and twenty-five elevators.”
While the Marriott’s capsule-like elevators sped up and down, Fortune explained some of the rudiments of elevatoring. The term “elevatoring” refers to the discipline of designing a building’s elevator system: how many, how big, how fast, and so on. You need to predict how many people will be using the elevators, and how they’ll go about their business. It isn’t rocket science, but it has its nuances and complications. The elevator consultant George Strakosch, in the preface to “The Vertical Transportation Handbook,” the industry bible, refers to it as the “obscure mystery.” To take elevatoring lightly is to risk dooming a building to dysfunction and its inhabitants to a kind of incremental purgatory.
In elevatoring, as in life, the essential variables are time and space. A well-elevatored building gets you up and down quickly, without giving up too much square footage to elevator banks. Especially with super-tall towers, the amount of core space that one must devote to elevators, in order to convey so many people so high, can make a building architecturally or economically infeasible. This limitation served to stunt the height of skyscrapers until, in 1973, the designers of the World Trade Center introduced the idea of sky lobbies. A sky lobby is like a transfer station: an express takes you there, and then you switch to a local. (As it happens, Fortune was working on a project to upgrade the Trade Center elevators when the towers were destroyed.)
There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset. In a residential building or a hotel, the tolerance goes up, but only by ten or twenty seconds. In the nineteen-sixties, many builders cheated a little—accepting, say, a thirty-four-second interval, and 11.5 per cent handling capacity—and came to regret it. Generally, England is over-elevatored; India is under-elevatored.
Fortune carries a “probable stop” table, which applies probability to the vexation that boils up when each passenger presses a button for a different floor. If there are ten people in an elevator that serves ten floors, it will likely make 6.5 stops. Ten people, thirty floors: 9.5 stops. (The table does not account for the exasperating phantom stop, when no one gets on or off.) Other factors are door open and close time, loading and unloading time, acceleration rate, and deceleration rate, which must be swift but gentle. You hear that interfloor traffic kills—something to mutter, perhaps, when a co-worker boards the elevator to travel one flight, especially if that co-worker is planning, at day’s end, to spend half an hour on a StairMaster. It’s also disastrous to have a cafeteria on anything but the ground floor, or one floor above or below it, accessible via escalator.
An over-elevatored building wastes space and deprives a landlord of revenue. An under-elevatored building suffers on the rental or resale market, and drives its tenants nuts. In extreme cases, when the wait becomes actually long, instead of merely perceptibly long, things fall apart. The Bronx family-court system, for example, was in a shambles last year because the elevators at its courthouse kept breaking down. (The stairs are closed, owing to security concerns.) This led to hour-long waits, which led to missed court dates, needless arrest warrants, and life-altering family strife.
Fortune took me elevator riding. Riding elevators, even when you are supposed to be paying attention, for the purpose of writing about them, is a pretty banal enterprise. So it was hard to focus on the matter at hand—not to just ride, expressionless and empty-brained, per usual, noting nothing, except that on the Captivate screen the word of the day was “sitzmark.” Otis has conducted research to find out whether people might better enjoy their time in elevators if it were more of an experience—if it would somehow help to emphasize that they’re in an elevator, hurtling up and down a shaft. Otis found, to little surprise, that people would rather be distracted from that fact. Even elevator music, designed to put passengers at ease, is now so closely associated with elevators that it is no longer widely used.
But there were a few attention-getting features at the Marriott. One was that the glass cabs allow you to see the elevator’s various components, and also how fast you’re going—a thrill or a trial, depending on your temperament or, according to Fortune, your gender. In his experience, most women face the door, away from the glass, to avoid the sight of the mezzanines flying by.
The other was the “destination dispatch” system that the Marriott introduced, a few years ago, becoming the first hotel in North America to do so. Such “smart elevators” have now been installed in a dozen buildings in New York, among them the headquarters of the Times, of Hearst, and of the News Corporation. Destination dispatch assigns passengers to an elevator according to which floors they’re going to, in an attempt to send each car to as few floors as possible. You enter your floor number at a central control panel in the lobby and are told which elevator to take.
With destination dispatch, the wait in the lobby may be longer, but the trip is shorter. And the waiting may not grate as much, because you know which car is yours. In Japan, the light over your prospective elevator lights up (“arrival immediate prediction lantern,” in the vulgate of vertical transportation), even if the elevator isn’t there yet, to account for what the Japanese call “psychological waiting time.” It’s like a nod of acknowledgment from a busy bartender.
Smart elevators are strange elevators, because there is no control panel in the car; the elevator knows where you are going. People tend to find it unnerving to ride in an elevator with no buttons; they feel as if they had been kidnapped by a Bond villain. Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command. The biggest drawback of destination dispatch, besides the anxiety of novelty, is that once you are in an elevator you cannot change your mind. To amend your floor choice, you must disembark, and start again. Elevator mind-changing—the sudden lunge for the unlit button—is rare enough; still, the option is nice. Also, when you get used to this system, you get into an elevator with buttons and forget to press one. But sometimes that happens anyway.
Destination dispatch, strictly speaking, was introduced eighteen years ago, by Schindler, the Swiss conglomerate, but a version of it was developed in the thirties, by the A. B. See Elevator Company, founded by the noted anti-feminist A. B. See (“If the world had had to depend on the inventive and constructive ability of women, we should still be sleeping on the plains”). Without the microprocessor, however, it was hard to implement. Schindler’s version, the Miconic 10, was developed by an engineer named Joris Schroeder, who has written dense essays about his “passenger-second minimizing cost-of-service algorithm.” Schindler claims that its system is up to thirty per cent more efficient than standard elevators. The other big manufacturers have come out with similar systems and make similar claims. In each, every bank of elevators has its own group-dispatch logic—which elevator picks up whom, and so on. “They have to talk to each other,” Fortune said. We have to trust that they are reasonable.
The first American building to use smart elevators, the Ameritech building, in Indianapolis, hired mimes to help people navigate the system. They are still rare enough so that the Marriott has an attendant on hand to assist bewildered guests. “It’s tricky putting this system into a building where people are always unfamiliar with it,” Fortune said. “By the time they know it, they leave.”
Fortune suggested that we go see 7 World Trade Center, a two-year-old building, of unspectacular height (fifty-two stories, seven hundred and fifty feet), because, he said, “it is the most advanced system going.” The elevators were Otis—Larry Silverstein, the building’s developer, is a longtime Otis man—and their destination-dispatch system is integrated with the security system; it reads your I.D. card at a turnstile and assigns you to an elevator. “The next phase of this is face-recognition biometrics,” Fortune said.
Otis had a full-time mechanic on site at 7 World Trade. His name was Sean Moran. He was hanging out by the turnstiles when we walked in, and Fortune asked how it was going with the dispatch system. “People are sheep,” Moran said. “They look, they go.”
We rode up to Floor 38, on Elevator D1. Facing down the urge to press a button in a buttonless elevator felt a little like quitting smoking. Fortune explained that, newfangled as destination dispatch may seem, it is in many respects a reversion to the old ways. “This is going to sound crazy, but we’re coming full circle,” Fortune said. In the early days, you’d have an operator in each car and a licensed attendant, or dispatcher, in the lobby, who would tell people where to go. The operator typically was a woman and the dispatcher a man, and he tended to know the name, face, and status of each tenant. He could assign elevators to contiguous floors and tell the gals when to leave and direct the boss to an empty, momentarily private elevator. “He was the logic,” Fortune said. When systems converted to automatic, in the middle of the last century, and operators and dispatchers disappeared, that central logician was lost, and lobbies descended into randomness.
Fortune and I changed elevators and went to one of the top floors, a vacant expanse with views in every direction: a forest of elevator shafts. The elevator professional sees the city with a kind of X-ray vision, revealing a hidden array of elevator genera—an Otis gearless, a Schindler, a Fujitec. For him, buildings are mere ornaments disguising the elevators that serve them. Below us was the pit where the Freedom Tower would go, but to Fortune it was ThyssenKrupp, which had recently underbid Otis for the job.
Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.
Bodies need to fit. Designers of public spaces have devised a maximum average unit size—that is, they’ve figured out how much space a person takes up, and how little of it he or she can abide. The master fitter is John J. Fruin, the author of “Pedestrian Planning and Design,” which was published in 1971 and reprinted, in 1987, by Elevator World, the publisher of the leading industry magazine, Elevator World. (Its January issue came with 3-D glasses, for viewing its best-new-elevator-of-the-year layout, of the Dexia BIL Banking Center, in Luxembourg.) Fruin introduced the concept of the “body ellipse,” a bird’s-eye graphic representation of an individual’s personal space. It’s essentially a shoulder-width oval with a head in the middle. He employed a standard set of near-maximum human dimensions: twenty-four inches wide (at the shoulders) and eighteen inches deep. If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”
The standard elevator measure is about two square feet per passenger—intimate, disturbing. “Elevators represent a special circumstance in which pedestrians are willing to submit to closer spacing than they would normally accept,” Fruin wrote, without much parsing the question of willingness. The book contains a pair of overhead photographs, part of an experiment conducted by Otis, of elevators loaded to capacity (by design, cabs are nearly impossible to overweight, unless the passengers are extremely tall). In one, a car is full of women, each of whom has 1.5 square feet of space. In the other, there are men as well as women, and each passenger gets 1.8 square feet per person: men are larger, and women, in their presence, try to claim more space, often by crossing their arms. It is worth noting that, in experiments with prisoners, researchers found that violent or schizophrenic inmates preferred more than fifteen times this area.
There’s a higher tolerance in Asia than in the United States for tight rides and long waits. “In China, you’ll get twenty-five people in a four-thousand-pound car,” Rick Pulling, the head of high-rise operations at Otis, told me. “That’s unheard of here.” Pulling said that at the Otis headquarters in Hong Kong people wait patiently in line for the elevators, behind a velvet rope overseen by an attendant, and cram in. “New Yorkers wouldn’t stand for it,” Pulling said. “He’d have two broken legs.”
Nicholas White opened the doors to urinate. As he did so, he hoped, in vain, that a trace of this violation might get the attention of someone in the lobby. He considered lighting matches and dropping them down the shaft, to attract notice, but still had the presence of mind to suspect that this might not be wise. The alarm bell kept ringing. He paced and waved at the overhead camera. He couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. To pass the time, he opened his wallet and compared an old twenty-dollar bill with a new one, and read the fine print on the back of a pair of tickets to a Jets game on Sunday afternoon, which he would never get to use. He imagined himself as Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” throwing the baseball against the wall. Eventually, he lay down on the floor, intent on sleep. The carpet was like coarse AstroTurf, and was lousy with nail trimmings and other detritus. It was amazing to him how much people could shed in such a short trip. He used his shoes for a pillow and laid his wallet, unfolded, over his eyes to keep out the light. It wasn’t hot, yet he was sweating. His wallet was damp. Maybe a day had passed. He drifted in and out of sleep, awakening each time to the grim recognition that his elevator confinement had not been a dream. His thirst was overpowering. The alarm was playing more aural tricks on him, so he decided to turn it off. Then he tried doing some Morse code with it. He yelled some more. He tried to pick away at the cinder-block wall.
At a certain point, he decided to go for the escape hatch in the ceiling. He thought of Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” climbing up and down the shaft. He knew it was a dangerous and desperate thing to do, but he didn’t care. He had to get out of the elevator. The height of the handrail in the car made it hard for him to get a leg up. It took him a while to figure out and then execute the maneuver that would allow him to spring up to the escape hatch. Finally, he swung himself up. The hatch was locked.
A vertical-transportation axiom states that if an elevator is in trouble the safest place to be is inside the elevator. This holds even if the elevator is not in trouble. Elevator surfing—riding on top of the cab, for kicks—is dangerous. This is why the escape hatch is always locked. By law, it’s bolted shut, from the outside. It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out.
You can get a fair sense of the perils of an elevator shaft by watching an elevator rush up and down one, its counterweight flying by, like the blade on a guillotine. The elevator companies I talked to wouldn’t let me ride on top of a car or get into a hoistway; just to see a machine room, I was required to sign a release and don a hard hat, safety glasses, and steel-toed boots. For a good look at the innards, I had to leave New York, city of elevators, and drive up to Otis’s testing center, in Bristol, Connecticut.
The Otis test tower rises twenty-eight stories above an office park, at the base of a wooded ridge. It’s the only tall building for miles around. Its hazy-day gray color and near-windowlessness suggest a top-secret military installation, a bat tower, or the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In one way, it’s the most over-elevatored building in the world; all it is, really, is elevators—twelve test hoistways, plus a regular elevator. That one gets busy. The wait can be as long as thirteen minutes.
Otis was founded by Elisha Graves Otis, who invented the safety brake in 1853, and who is therefore usually thought of, in the simplistic way of historical innovation accreditation, as the inventor of the elevator. Mechanical hoists go back at least as far as Archimedes, and many men, not all of them employed by Otis, did their part to make the elevator work. Otis, having absorbed or outlasted all its native rivals, and gone through one of the first-ever hostile takeovers (by United Technologies, in 1976), is the last big American elevator company. Its major global competitors are Schindler, ThyssenKrupp, Kone, and Mitsubishi—Swiss, German, Finnish, and Japanese. The action is overseas. Otis does about eighty per cent of its business outside the United States, especially in the high-rise boomtowns of the Gulf states and in China. (Fortune had told me that, prestige aside, the super-tall tower jobs are basically loss leaders for the elevator companies: “Very few high-rise jobs are money makers. You give ’em away for the maintenance contract.”)
It was Rick Pulling, Otis’s felicitously named high-rise man and the company’s chief envoy, who took me around the test tower. He has worked at Otis for twenty-three years. He has an air of world-weariness, earned perhaps in complicated dealings with foreign builders and governments, but it gave way to fervid evangelism when the subject turned, as it did very quickly, to elevators. “We’ll wait ten to fifteen minutes for a train, without complaining,” he said. “But wait thirty seconds for an elevator and the world’s coming to an end. Which means, really, that we’ve done a good job. We deliver short waits. But why are we held to a different standard?”
Our first stop, on the ground floor, was the so-called “drop car,” a rudimentary elevator platform stacked with dozens of hundred-and-fifty-pound lead plates. The Otis engineers use it to test overspeed stopping—free-fall prevention. The drop car shares a hoistway with another half-elevator, from which a tester can examine the performance of safety brake shoes. Piles of them were on the floor, like discarded lobster claws. It takes just a couple of feet for the brakes to engage. Over several weeks, the drop car lurches down the hoistway, from the top of the building to the ground, in mini-free-fall intervals that make the notion of an eighty-floor drop seem both ludicrous and newly horrifying.
To the age-old half-serious question of whether a passenger barrelling earthward in a runaway elevator should jump in the air just before impact, Pulling responded, as vertical-transportation professionals ceaselessly must, that you can’t jump up fast enough to counteract the rate of descent. “And how are you supposed to know when to jump?” he said. As for an alternative strategy—lie flat on the floor?—he shrugged: “Dead’s dead.”
All through the building, you could hear the clicking and whirring of elevators. We rode up to the twenty-eighth floor, a single vast room, with various hoistway openings in the floor, like crevasses. Men in hard hats were futzing with a control panel. “We’re interpreting the data before we proceed,” one of them said. In a corner was the 70T, a fourteen-ton turbine of steel about the size of a VW Beetle, capable of hauling seventy tons at fifty feet a second. In another corner there was a full-sized working replica of the “Improved Hoisting Apparatus,” a suspended wooden platform that looked a bit like a gallows, which Elisha Otis had débuted at the Crystal Palace, in 1854, to demonstrate his new brake. Standing on the platform, high above the ground, he had an assistant cut the hoist rope with an axe, and before the platform could fall a wagon spring engaged a toggle on a cogged rail, and the hoisting apparatus held.
From one incarnation to the other, the basic principles—car, sheave, rope, safety—remain the same. With the exception of a few quantum leaps—steel cable, electricity, microprocessing—elevator advancements have been subtle and incremental. On the twenty-fifth floor, we came across evidence of one: spools of flat, rubbery-looking cable. In recent years, Otis has introduced flat hoist belts, made of polyurethane threaded with steel, which are lighter, stronger, and more energy-efficient than the old steel ropes. (Otis gave its employees gifts of belts made out of the cable.) The flat cables have made possible much smaller machines, facilitating the proliferation of what are called, rather inelegantly, “machineroomless” elevators. A machine the size of a marmot, rather than of a moose, can be installed in the shaft, rather than in a room of its own, freeing up space for architects and landlords. This is what passes for cutting edge.
The big ideas tend to falter on the laws of physics. A single elevator can climb no higher than seventeen hundred feet. A hoist rope any longer is too heavy to be practical; at thirty-two hundred feet, it will snap, like a stream of spit in a stairwell. A decade ago, Otis developed a prototype of a conveyance called Odyssey, which could slide out of its shaft and travel on a horizontal track to another shaft, with the help of a linear induction motor. It was scuttled by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The rising cost of electricity has confounded other lofty dreams, like the ropeless elevator.
We rode downstairs, to an immaculate warehouse space called the Quality Assurance Center—“The engineer’s playground,” Pulling called it—where Otis components were subjected to wear-and-tear tests. Kiln-like machines exposed parts to heavy doses of heat, dust, and salt fog. Hoist belts underwent twenty years of jerking and pulling in a few months. The only hint of novelty, of futuristic aspiration and delight—of Willy Wonka’s flying glass elevator or Colson Whitehead’s black box or the long-imagined elevator to the moon—was a hundred-foot-long gray mat. It happened to trace Odyssey’s vestigial test course—the abandoned big idea. Perhaps the ambivalence, if not aversion, that people seem to feel toward the elevator derives from a sense that it isn’t as fabulous as it should be, near-perfect though it already is.
At a certain point, Nicholas White ran out of ideas. Anger and vindictiveness took root. He began to think, They, whoever they were, shouldn’t be able to get away with this, that he deserved some compensation for the ordeal. He cast about for blame. He wondered where his colleague was, why she hadn’t been alarmed enough by his failure to return, jacketless, from smoking a cigarette to call security. Whose fault is this? he wondered. Who’s going to pay? He decided that there was no way he was going to work the following week.
And then he gave up. The time passed in a kind of degraded fever dream. On the videotape, he lies motionless for hours at a time, face down on the floor.
A voice woke him up: “Is there someone in there?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing in there?”
White tried to explain; the voice in the intercom seemed to assume that he was an intruder. “Get me the fuck out of here!” White shrieked. Duly persuaded, the guard asked him if he wanted anything. White, who had been planning to join a few friends at a bar on Friday evening, asked for a beer.
Before long, an elevator-maintenance team arrived and, over the intercom, coached him through a set of maneuvers with the buttons. White asked what day it was, and, when they told him it was Sunday at 4 P.M., he was shocked. He had been trapped for forty-one hours. He felt a change in the breeze, which suggested that the elevator was moving. When he felt it slow again, he wrenched the door open, and there was the lobby. In his memory, he had to climb up onto the landing, but the video does not corroborate this. When he emerged from the elevator, he saw his friends, with a couple of security guards, and a maintenance man, waiting, with an empty chair. His friends turned to see him and were appalled at the sight; he looked like a ghost, one of them said later. The security guard handed him an open Heineken. He took one sip but found the beer repellent, like Hans Castorp with his Maria Mancini cigar. White told a guard, “Somebody could’ve died in there.”
“I know,” the guard said.
White had to go upstairs to get his jacket. He demanded that the guards come with him, and so they rode together on the service elevator, with the elevator operator. The presence of others with radios put him at ease. In his office he found that his co-worker, in a fit of pique over his disappearance, had written an angry screed, and taped it to his computer screen, for all their colleagues to see. He went home, and then headed to a bar. He woke up to a reel of phone messages and a horde of reporters colonizing his stoop. He barely left his apartment in the ensuing days, deputizing his friends to talk to reporters through a crack in the door.
White never went back to work at the magazine. Caught up in media attention (which he shunned but thrilled to), prodded by friends, and perhaps provoked by overly solicitous overtures from McGraw-Hill, White fell under the sway of renown and grievance, and then that of the legal establishment. He got a lawyer, and came to believe that returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation. Instead, he spent eight weeks in Anguilla. Eventually, Business Week had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for twenty-five million dollars, against the building’s management and the elevator-maintenance company, took four years. They settled for an amount that White is not allowed to disclose, but he will not contest that it was a low number, hardly six figures. He never learned why the elevator stopped; there was talk of a power dip, but nothing definite. Meanwhile, White no longer had his job, which he’d held for fifteen years, and lost all contact with his former colleagues. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed.
Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn’t so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work. If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won’t blame the elevator.
The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.
The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.
The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property. Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? friction? heat?—start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.
Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators. Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft. One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator. (The operator of the other one had stepped out for a cigarette.) By the time the car crashed into the buffer in the pit (a hydraulic truncheon designed to be a cushion of last resort), a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it, serving as a kind of spring. A pillow of air pressure, as the speeding car compressed the air in the shaft, may have helped ease the impact as well. Still, the landing was not soft. The car’s walls buckled, and steel debris tore up through the floor. It was the woman’s good fortune to be cowering in a corner when the car hit. She was severely injured but alive.
Traction elevators—the ones hanging from ropes, as opposed to dumbwaiters, or mining elevators, or those lifted by hydraulic pumps—are typically borne aloft by six or eight hoist cables, each of which, according to the national elevator-safety code (and the code determines all), is capable on its own of supporting the full load of the elevator plus twenty-five per cent more weight. Another line, the governor cable, is connected to a device that detects if the elevator car is descending at a rate twenty-five per cent faster than its maximum designed speed. If that happens, the device trips the safeties, bronze shoes that run along vertical rails in the shaft. These brakes are designed to stop the car quickly, but not so abruptly as to cause injury. They work. This is why free falling, at least, is so rare.
Still, elevator lore has its share of horrors: strandings, manglings, fires, drownings, decapitations. An estimated two hundred people were killed in elevators at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—some probably in free-fall plunges, but many by fire, smoke, or entrapment and subsequent structural collapse. The elevator industry likes to insist that, short of airplane rammings, most accidents are the result of human error, of passengers or workers doing things they should not. Trying to run in through closing doors is asking for trouble; so is climbing up into an elevator car, or down out of one, when it is stuck between floors, or letting a piece of equipment get lodged in the brake, as happened to a service elevator at 5 Times Square, in Manhattan, four years ago, causing the counterweight to plummet (the counterweight, which aids an elevator’s rise and slows its descent, is typically forty per cent heavier than an empty car) and the elevator to shoot up, at sixty miles an hour, into the beams at the top of the shaft, killing the attendant inside. Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.
Nonetheless, elevators are extraordinarily safe—far safer than cars, to say nothing of other forms of vertical transport. Escalators are scary. Statistics are elusive (“Nobody collects them,” Edward Donoghue, the managing director of the trade organization National Elevator Industry, said), but the claim, routinely advanced by elevator professionals, that elevators are ten times as safe as escalators seems to arise from fifteen-year-old numbers showing that, while there are roughly twenty times as many elevators as escalators, there are only a third more elevator accidents. An average of twenty-six people die in (or on) elevators in the United States every year, but most of these are people being paid to work on them. That may still seem like a lot, until you consider that that many die in automobiles every five hours. In New York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven billion elevator trips a year—thirty million every day—and yet hardly more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical attention. The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days. As the world urbanizes—every year, in developing countries, sixty million people move into cities—the numbers will go up, and up and down.
Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is energy-efficient—the counterweight does a great deal of the work, and the new systems these days regenerate electricity. The elevator is a hybrid, by design.
While anthems have been written to jet travel, locomotives, and the lure of the open road, the poetry of vertical transportation is scant. What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down? In “The Intuitionist,” Colson Whitehead’s novel about elevator inspectors, the conveyance itself is more conceit than thing; the plot concerns, among other things, the quest for a “black box,” a perfect elevator, but the nature of its perfection remains mysterious. Onscreen, there has been “The Shaft” (“Your next stop . . . is hell”), a movie about a deadly malfunctioning elevator system in a Manhattan tower, which had the misfortune of coming out the Friday before September 11th, and a scattering of inaccurate set pieces in action movies, such as “Speed.” (There are no ladders or lights in most shafts.) Movies and television programs, such as “Boston Legal” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” often rely on the elevator to bring characters together, as a kind of artificial enforcement of proximity and conversation. The brevity of the ride suits the need for a stretch of witty or portentous dialogue, for stolen kisses and furtive arguments. For some people, the elevator ride is a social life.
When filmmakers want to shoot an elevator scene, they will spin the elevator around, like a lazy Susan, so that the character can disembark into a different set. This trick captures something about an elevator ride—the way that it can feel like teleportation. You go in here and come out there, and you hardly consider that you have just raced up or down a vertiginous, pitch-black shaft. When you’re waiting for a ride, you don’t think that what lurks behind the outer doors is emptiness. Every so often, a door opens when it shouldn’t and someone steps into the void. This is worth keeping in mind.
People don’t like to ride in elevators or wait for them. Many people can’t even get in one, or would really rather not. “They’re not psychotic,” Jerilyn Ross, a cognitive-behavioral therapist in Washington and the president of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, said recently. “It’s just a misfiring of the fight-or-flight response.” Elevator phobia is a kind of claustrophobia, and as such the fear is as much of experiencing fear—of having a panic attack, in an enclosed space—as it is of the thing itself. One of Ross’s board members is David Hoberman, who produced the television series “Monk,” several episodes of which have touched on Detective Monk’s elevator phobia. “I have it,” Hoberman said recently. “It’s for real. I avoid elevators at all costs.” His least favorite are the ones in small doctors’-office buildings, in the Valley.
Hoberman has been undergoing behavioral elevator therapy for six months. His therapist began by taking him to the UCLA psychology department and locking him in a black box about the size of a phone booth. The first time, Hoberman lasted just five seconds. After four or five sessions, he could handle ten minutes. Before long, he and his therapist were riding elevators together, all over campus. He just built a house in Los Angeles, and it has an elevator, because his parents insisted that it will be useful to him when he grows old. “I will never ride in it,” Hoberman said. “I don’t have a fear of dying in an elevator, or of the elevator losing control — I have a fear of being stuck with my mind.”
Nicholas White wasn’t phobic, but he wasn’t exactly fond of elevators. When he was a boy, he and some other kids were trapped in one on their way down from a birthday party in an apartment building on Riverside Drive. After about twenty minutes, the Fire Department pulled the kids out, one at a time. In his recollection, he was the only person to ask the firemen whether the cables might snap.
White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)
After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette. It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach. Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes.
At a certain point, he decided to open the doors. He pried them apart and held them open with his foot. He was presented with a cinder-block wall on which, perfectly centered, were scrawled three “13”s—one in chalk, one in red paint, one in black. It was a dispiriting sight. He concluded that he must be on the thirteenth floor, and that, this being an express elevator, there was no egress from the shaft anywhere for many stories up or down. (Such a shaft is known as a blind hoistway.) He peered down through the crack between the wall and the sill of the elevator and saw that it was very dark. He could make out some light at the bottom. It looked far away. A breeze blew up the shaft.
He started to call out. “Hello?” He tried cupping his hand to his mouth and yelled out some more. “Help! Is there anybody there? I’m stuck in an elevator!” He kept at it for a while.
Until recently, one of New York City’s most notoriously dysfunctional elevator banks could be found at the Marriott Marquis hotel, a forty-nine-story convention mill in Times Square, built in the early eighties, where glass elevators are arrayed like petals around a stalk of concrete, in the center of a vast atrium. For years, visitors complained of waits of as much as twenty minutes.
One morning not long ago, I met James Fortune, the man who designed that elevator system, in the lobby of the Marriott. Fortune, an affable industrial engineer originally from Pasadena, can reasonably disavow responsibility for the hotel’s elevator failings; a decision to put the lobby on the eighth floor essentially doubled the amount of work the elevators had to do to get guests to their rooms. (“The building’s underelevatored,” he told me, with a grimace. “We did the best we could.”) Fortune is probably the world’s busiest and best-known elevator consultant, especially in the category of super-tall towers—buildings of more than a hundred stories—which are proliferating around the world, owing in large part to elevator solutions provided by men like Fortune. Elevator consultants come in various guises. Some make the bulk of their living by testifying in court in accident lawsuits. Others collaborate with architects and developers to handle the human traffic in big buildings. Fortune is one of those.
Four years ago, Fortune, who is sixty-six, retired as president of the pioneering elevator consulting firm Lerch Bates, but his retirement lasted just two weeks. He couldn’t resist the call of the elevator. He started a new firm, with headquarters in the relatively horizontal and un-elevatored city of Galveston, Texas—the majority of his work is overseas, especially in Asia and the Middle East, and the Houston airport is relatively central. In China alone, there are dozens of cities with a population of more than two million and, Fortune noted, “every city wants an iconic tower.” Persian Gulf cities like Doha and Dubai are a blizzard of elevator jobs.
Fortune has done the elevators, as they say, in five of the world’s ten tallest buildings. While at Lerch Bates, he did the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101 Tower, which has the fastest elevators in the world—rising at more than fifty-five feet per second, or about thirty-five miles an hour. The cars are pressurized, to prevent ear damage. He also did Burj Dubai, which, when it is completed, next year, will be the new tallest building, at least until it is supplanted by another one he is working on in the region. Burj Dubai will have forty-six elevators, including two double-deckers that will go straight to the top. (“I love double-decks,” Fortune said.) Adrian Smith, the building’s architect, has grand designs for towers reaching hundreds of stories—vertical cities—which would require a sophistication of conveyance not yet available. Two weeks ago, a Saudi prince announced a plan for a mile-high tower in a new city being built near Jidda—more than twice as tall as Burj Dubai. Fortune is bidding on that one, too. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mile-high, five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-story tower, called the Mile-High Illinois, in 1956, a kind of architectural manifesto of density. Wright allowed for seventy-six elevators—atomic-powered quintuple-deckers, rising at sixty miles an hour. “I ran the studies once,” Fortune said. “He wasn’t even close. He should’ve had two hundred and fifteen to two hundred and twenty-five elevators.”
While the Marriott’s capsule-like elevators sped up and down, Fortune explained some of the rudiments of elevatoring. The term “elevatoring” refers to the discipline of designing a building’s elevator system: how many, how big, how fast, and so on. You need to predict how many people will be using the elevators, and how they’ll go about their business. It isn’t rocket science, but it has its nuances and complications. The elevator consultant George Strakosch, in the preface to “The Vertical Transportation Handbook,” the industry bible, refers to it as the “obscure mystery.” To take elevatoring lightly is to risk dooming a building to dysfunction and its inhabitants to a kind of incremental purgatory.
In elevatoring, as in life, the essential variables are time and space. A well-elevatored building gets you up and down quickly, without giving up too much square footage to elevator banks. Especially with super-tall towers, the amount of core space that one must devote to elevators, in order to convey so many people so high, can make a building architecturally or economically infeasible. This limitation served to stunt the height of skyscrapers until, in 1973, the designers of the World Trade Center introduced the idea of sky lobbies. A sky lobby is like a transfer station: an express takes you there, and then you switch to a local. (As it happens, Fortune was working on a project to upgrade the Trade Center elevators when the towers were destroyed.)
There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset. In a residential building or a hotel, the tolerance goes up, but only by ten or twenty seconds. In the nineteen-sixties, many builders cheated a little—accepting, say, a thirty-four-second interval, and 11.5 per cent handling capacity—and came to regret it. Generally, England is over-elevatored; India is under-elevatored.
Fortune carries a “probable stop” table, which applies probability to the vexation that boils up when each passenger presses a button for a different floor. If there are ten people in an elevator that serves ten floors, it will likely make 6.5 stops. Ten people, thirty floors: 9.5 stops. (The table does not account for the exasperating phantom stop, when no one gets on or off.) Other factors are door open and close time, loading and unloading time, acceleration rate, and deceleration rate, which must be swift but gentle. You hear that interfloor traffic kills—something to mutter, perhaps, when a co-worker boards the elevator to travel one flight, especially if that co-worker is planning, at day’s end, to spend half an hour on a StairMaster. It’s also disastrous to have a cafeteria on anything but the ground floor, or one floor above or below it, accessible via escalator.
An over-elevatored building wastes space and deprives a landlord of revenue. An under-elevatored building suffers on the rental or resale market, and drives its tenants nuts. In extreme cases, when the wait becomes actually long, instead of merely perceptibly long, things fall apart. The Bronx family-court system, for example, was in a shambles last year because the elevators at its courthouse kept breaking down. (The stairs are closed, owing to security concerns.) This led to hour-long waits, which led to missed court dates, needless arrest warrants, and life-altering family strife.
Fortune took me elevator riding. Riding elevators, even when you are supposed to be paying attention, for the purpose of writing about them, is a pretty banal enterprise. So it was hard to focus on the matter at hand—not to just ride, expressionless and empty-brained, per usual, noting nothing, except that on the Captivate screen the word of the day was “sitzmark.” Otis has conducted research to find out whether people might better enjoy their time in elevators if it were more of an experience—if it would somehow help to emphasize that they’re in an elevator, hurtling up and down a shaft. Otis found, to little surprise, that people would rather be distracted from that fact. Even elevator music, designed to put passengers at ease, is now so closely associated with elevators that it is no longer widely used.
But there were a few attention-getting features at the Marriott. One was that the glass cabs allow you to see the elevator’s various components, and also how fast you’re going—a thrill or a trial, depending on your temperament or, according to Fortune, your gender. In his experience, most women face the door, away from the glass, to avoid the sight of the mezzanines flying by.
The other was the “destination dispatch” system that the Marriott introduced, a few years ago, becoming the first hotel in North America to do so. Such “smart elevators” have now been installed in a dozen buildings in New York, among them the headquarters of the Times, of Hearst, and of the News Corporation. Destination dispatch assigns passengers to an elevator according to which floors they’re going to, in an attempt to send each car to as few floors as possible. You enter your floor number at a central control panel in the lobby and are told which elevator to take.
With destination dispatch, the wait in the lobby may be longer, but the trip is shorter. And the waiting may not grate as much, because you know which car is yours. In Japan, the light over your prospective elevator lights up (“arrival immediate prediction lantern,” in the vulgate of vertical transportation), even if the elevator isn’t there yet, to account for what the Japanese call “psychological waiting time.” It’s like a nod of acknowledgment from a busy bartender.
Smart elevators are strange elevators, because there is no control panel in the car; the elevator knows where you are going. People tend to find it unnerving to ride in an elevator with no buttons; they feel as if they had been kidnapped by a Bond villain. Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command. The biggest drawback of destination dispatch, besides the anxiety of novelty, is that once you are in an elevator you cannot change your mind. To amend your floor choice, you must disembark, and start again. Elevator mind-changing—the sudden lunge for the unlit button—is rare enough; still, the option is nice. Also, when you get used to this system, you get into an elevator with buttons and forget to press one. But sometimes that happens anyway.
Destination dispatch, strictly speaking, was introduced eighteen years ago, by Schindler, the Swiss conglomerate, but a version of it was developed in the thirties, by the A. B. See Elevator Company, founded by the noted anti-feminist A. B. See (“If the world had had to depend on the inventive and constructive ability of women, we should still be sleeping on the plains”). Without the microprocessor, however, it was hard to implement. Schindler’s version, the Miconic 10, was developed by an engineer named Joris Schroeder, who has written dense essays about his “passenger-second minimizing cost-of-service algorithm.” Schindler claims that its system is up to thirty per cent more efficient than standard elevators. The other big manufacturers have come out with similar systems and make similar claims. In each, every bank of elevators has its own group-dispatch logic—which elevator picks up whom, and so on. “They have to talk to each other,” Fortune said. We have to trust that they are reasonable.
The first American building to use smart elevators, the Ameritech building, in Indianapolis, hired mimes to help people navigate the system. They are still rare enough so that the Marriott has an attendant on hand to assist bewildered guests. “It’s tricky putting this system into a building where people are always unfamiliar with it,” Fortune said. “By the time they know it, they leave.”
Fortune suggested that we go see 7 World Trade Center, a two-year-old building, of unspectacular height (fifty-two stories, seven hundred and fifty feet), because, he said, “it is the most advanced system going.” The elevators were Otis—Larry Silverstein, the building’s developer, is a longtime Otis man—and their destination-dispatch system is integrated with the security system; it reads your I.D. card at a turnstile and assigns you to an elevator. “The next phase of this is face-recognition biometrics,” Fortune said.
Otis had a full-time mechanic on site at 7 World Trade. His name was Sean Moran. He was hanging out by the turnstiles when we walked in, and Fortune asked how it was going with the dispatch system. “People are sheep,” Moran said. “They look, they go.”
We rode up to Floor 38, on Elevator D1. Facing down the urge to press a button in a buttonless elevator felt a little like quitting smoking. Fortune explained that, newfangled as destination dispatch may seem, it is in many respects a reversion to the old ways. “This is going to sound crazy, but we’re coming full circle,” Fortune said. In the early days, you’d have an operator in each car and a licensed attendant, or dispatcher, in the lobby, who would tell people where to go. The operator typically was a woman and the dispatcher a man, and he tended to know the name, face, and status of each tenant. He could assign elevators to contiguous floors and tell the gals when to leave and direct the boss to an empty, momentarily private elevator. “He was the logic,” Fortune said. When systems converted to automatic, in the middle of the last century, and operators and dispatchers disappeared, that central logician was lost, and lobbies descended into randomness.
Fortune and I changed elevators and went to one of the top floors, a vacant expanse with views in every direction: a forest of elevator shafts. The elevator professional sees the city with a kind of X-ray vision, revealing a hidden array of elevator genera—an Otis gearless, a Schindler, a Fujitec. For him, buildings are mere ornaments disguising the elevators that serve them. Below us was the pit where the Freedom Tower would go, but to Fortune it was ThyssenKrupp, which had recently underbid Otis for the job.
Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.
Bodies need to fit. Designers of public spaces have devised a maximum average unit size—that is, they’ve figured out how much space a person takes up, and how little of it he or she can abide. The master fitter is John J. Fruin, the author of “Pedestrian Planning and Design,” which was published in 1971 and reprinted, in 1987, by Elevator World, the publisher of the leading industry magazine, Elevator World. (Its January issue came with 3-D glasses, for viewing its best-new-elevator-of-the-year layout, of the Dexia BIL Banking Center, in Luxembourg.) Fruin introduced the concept of the “body ellipse,” a bird’s-eye graphic representation of an individual’s personal space. It’s essentially a shoulder-width oval with a head in the middle. He employed a standard set of near-maximum human dimensions: twenty-four inches wide (at the shoulders) and eighteen inches deep. If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”
The standard elevator measure is about two square feet per passenger—intimate, disturbing. “Elevators represent a special circumstance in which pedestrians are willing to submit to closer spacing than they would normally accept,” Fruin wrote, without much parsing the question of willingness. The book contains a pair of overhead photographs, part of an experiment conducted by Otis, of elevators loaded to capacity (by design, cabs are nearly impossible to overweight, unless the passengers are extremely tall). In one, a car is full of women, each of whom has 1.5 square feet of space. In the other, there are men as well as women, and each passenger gets 1.8 square feet per person: men are larger, and women, in their presence, try to claim more space, often by crossing their arms. It is worth noting that, in experiments with prisoners, researchers found that violent or schizophrenic inmates preferred more than fifteen times this area.
There’s a higher tolerance in Asia than in the United States for tight rides and long waits. “In China, you’ll get twenty-five people in a four-thousand-pound car,” Rick Pulling, the head of high-rise operations at Otis, told me. “That’s unheard of here.” Pulling said that at the Otis headquarters in Hong Kong people wait patiently in line for the elevators, behind a velvet rope overseen by an attendant, and cram in. “New Yorkers wouldn’t stand for it,” Pulling said. “He’d have two broken legs.”
Nicholas White opened the doors to urinate. As he did so, he hoped, in vain, that a trace of this violation might get the attention of someone in the lobby. He considered lighting matches and dropping them down the shaft, to attract notice, but still had the presence of mind to suspect that this might not be wise. The alarm bell kept ringing. He paced and waved at the overhead camera. He couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. To pass the time, he opened his wallet and compared an old twenty-dollar bill with a new one, and read the fine print on the back of a pair of tickets to a Jets game on Sunday afternoon, which he would never get to use. He imagined himself as Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” throwing the baseball against the wall. Eventually, he lay down on the floor, intent on sleep. The carpet was like coarse AstroTurf, and was lousy with nail trimmings and other detritus. It was amazing to him how much people could shed in such a short trip. He used his shoes for a pillow and laid his wallet, unfolded, over his eyes to keep out the light. It wasn’t hot, yet he was sweating. His wallet was damp. Maybe a day had passed. He drifted in and out of sleep, awakening each time to the grim recognition that his elevator confinement had not been a dream. His thirst was overpowering. The alarm was playing more aural tricks on him, so he decided to turn it off. Then he tried doing some Morse code with it. He yelled some more. He tried to pick away at the cinder-block wall.
At a certain point, he decided to go for the escape hatch in the ceiling. He thought of Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” climbing up and down the shaft. He knew it was a dangerous and desperate thing to do, but he didn’t care. He had to get out of the elevator. The height of the handrail in the car made it hard for him to get a leg up. It took him a while to figure out and then execute the maneuver that would allow him to spring up to the escape hatch. Finally, he swung himself up. The hatch was locked.
A vertical-transportation axiom states that if an elevator is in trouble the safest place to be is inside the elevator. This holds even if the elevator is not in trouble. Elevator surfing—riding on top of the cab, for kicks—is dangerous. This is why the escape hatch is always locked. By law, it’s bolted shut, from the outside. It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out.
You can get a fair sense of the perils of an elevator shaft by watching an elevator rush up and down one, its counterweight flying by, like the blade on a guillotine. The elevator companies I talked to wouldn’t let me ride on top of a car or get into a hoistway; just to see a machine room, I was required to sign a release and don a hard hat, safety glasses, and steel-toed boots. For a good look at the innards, I had to leave New York, city of elevators, and drive up to Otis’s testing center, in Bristol, Connecticut.
The Otis test tower rises twenty-eight stories above an office park, at the base of a wooded ridge. It’s the only tall building for miles around. Its hazy-day gray color and near-windowlessness suggest a top-secret military installation, a bat tower, or the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In one way, it’s the most over-elevatored building in the world; all it is, really, is elevators—twelve test hoistways, plus a regular elevator. That one gets busy. The wait can be as long as thirteen minutes.
Otis was founded by Elisha Graves Otis, who invented the safety brake in 1853, and who is therefore usually thought of, in the simplistic way of historical innovation accreditation, as the inventor of the elevator. Mechanical hoists go back at least as far as Archimedes, and many men, not all of them employed by Otis, did their part to make the elevator work. Otis, having absorbed or outlasted all its native rivals, and gone through one of the first-ever hostile takeovers (by United Technologies, in 1976), is the last big American elevator company. Its major global competitors are Schindler, ThyssenKrupp, Kone, and Mitsubishi—Swiss, German, Finnish, and Japanese. The action is overseas. Otis does about eighty per cent of its business outside the United States, especially in the high-rise boomtowns of the Gulf states and in China. (Fortune had told me that, prestige aside, the super-tall tower jobs are basically loss leaders for the elevator companies: “Very few high-rise jobs are money makers. You give ’em away for the maintenance contract.”)
It was Rick Pulling, Otis’s felicitously named high-rise man and the company’s chief envoy, who took me around the test tower. He has worked at Otis for twenty-three years. He has an air of world-weariness, earned perhaps in complicated dealings with foreign builders and governments, but it gave way to fervid evangelism when the subject turned, as it did very quickly, to elevators. “We’ll wait ten to fifteen minutes for a train, without complaining,” he said. “But wait thirty seconds for an elevator and the world’s coming to an end. Which means, really, that we’ve done a good job. We deliver short waits. But why are we held to a different standard?”
Our first stop, on the ground floor, was the so-called “drop car,” a rudimentary elevator platform stacked with dozens of hundred-and-fifty-pound lead plates. The Otis engineers use it to test overspeed stopping—free-fall prevention. The drop car shares a hoistway with another half-elevator, from which a tester can examine the performance of safety brake shoes. Piles of them were on the floor, like discarded lobster claws. It takes just a couple of feet for the brakes to engage. Over several weeks, the drop car lurches down the hoistway, from the top of the building to the ground, in mini-free-fall intervals that make the notion of an eighty-floor drop seem both ludicrous and newly horrifying.
To the age-old half-serious question of whether a passenger barrelling earthward in a runaway elevator should jump in the air just before impact, Pulling responded, as vertical-transportation professionals ceaselessly must, that you can’t jump up fast enough to counteract the rate of descent. “And how are you supposed to know when to jump?” he said. As for an alternative strategy—lie flat on the floor?—he shrugged: “Dead’s dead.”
All through the building, you could hear the clicking and whirring of elevators. We rode up to the twenty-eighth floor, a single vast room, with various hoistway openings in the floor, like crevasses. Men in hard hats were futzing with a control panel. “We’re interpreting the data before we proceed,” one of them said. In a corner was the 70T, a fourteen-ton turbine of steel about the size of a VW Beetle, capable of hauling seventy tons at fifty feet a second. In another corner there was a full-sized working replica of the “Improved Hoisting Apparatus,” a suspended wooden platform that looked a bit like a gallows, which Elisha Otis had débuted at the Crystal Palace, in 1854, to demonstrate his new brake. Standing on the platform, high above the ground, he had an assistant cut the hoist rope with an axe, and before the platform could fall a wagon spring engaged a toggle on a cogged rail, and the hoisting apparatus held.
From one incarnation to the other, the basic principles—car, sheave, rope, safety—remain the same. With the exception of a few quantum leaps—steel cable, electricity, microprocessing—elevator advancements have been subtle and incremental. On the twenty-fifth floor, we came across evidence of one: spools of flat, rubbery-looking cable. In recent years, Otis has introduced flat hoist belts, made of polyurethane threaded with steel, which are lighter, stronger, and more energy-efficient than the old steel ropes. (Otis gave its employees gifts of belts made out of the cable.) The flat cables have made possible much smaller machines, facilitating the proliferation of what are called, rather inelegantly, “machineroomless” elevators. A machine the size of a marmot, rather than of a moose, can be installed in the shaft, rather than in a room of its own, freeing up space for architects and landlords. This is what passes for cutting edge.
The big ideas tend to falter on the laws of physics. A single elevator can climb no higher than seventeen hundred feet. A hoist rope any longer is too heavy to be practical; at thirty-two hundred feet, it will snap, like a stream of spit in a stairwell. A decade ago, Otis developed a prototype of a conveyance called Odyssey, which could slide out of its shaft and travel on a horizontal track to another shaft, with the help of a linear induction motor. It was scuttled by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The rising cost of electricity has confounded other lofty dreams, like the ropeless elevator.
We rode downstairs, to an immaculate warehouse space called the Quality Assurance Center—“The engineer’s playground,” Pulling called it—where Otis components were subjected to wear-and-tear tests. Kiln-like machines exposed parts to heavy doses of heat, dust, and salt fog. Hoist belts underwent twenty years of jerking and pulling in a few months. The only hint of novelty, of futuristic aspiration and delight—of Willy Wonka’s flying glass elevator or Colson Whitehead’s black box or the long-imagined elevator to the moon—was a hundred-foot-long gray mat. It happened to trace Odyssey’s vestigial test course—the abandoned big idea. Perhaps the ambivalence, if not aversion, that people seem to feel toward the elevator derives from a sense that it isn’t as fabulous as it should be, near-perfect though it already is.
At a certain point, Nicholas White ran out of ideas. Anger and vindictiveness took root. He began to think, They, whoever they were, shouldn’t be able to get away with this, that he deserved some compensation for the ordeal. He cast about for blame. He wondered where his colleague was, why she hadn’t been alarmed enough by his failure to return, jacketless, from smoking a cigarette to call security. Whose fault is this? he wondered. Who’s going to pay? He decided that there was no way he was going to work the following week.
And then he gave up. The time passed in a kind of degraded fever dream. On the videotape, he lies motionless for hours at a time, face down on the floor.
A voice woke him up: “Is there someone in there?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing in there?”
White tried to explain; the voice in the intercom seemed to assume that he was an intruder. “Get me the fuck out of here!” White shrieked. Duly persuaded, the guard asked him if he wanted anything. White, who had been planning to join a few friends at a bar on Friday evening, asked for a beer.
Before long, an elevator-maintenance team arrived and, over the intercom, coached him through a set of maneuvers with the buttons. White asked what day it was, and, when they told him it was Sunday at 4 P.M., he was shocked. He had been trapped for forty-one hours. He felt a change in the breeze, which suggested that the elevator was moving. When he felt it slow again, he wrenched the door open, and there was the lobby. In his memory, he had to climb up onto the landing, but the video does not corroborate this. When he emerged from the elevator, he saw his friends, with a couple of security guards, and a maintenance man, waiting, with an empty chair. His friends turned to see him and were appalled at the sight; he looked like a ghost, one of them said later. The security guard handed him an open Heineken. He took one sip but found the beer repellent, like Hans Castorp with his Maria Mancini cigar. White told a guard, “Somebody could’ve died in there.”
“I know,” the guard said.
White had to go upstairs to get his jacket. He demanded that the guards come with him, and so they rode together on the service elevator, with the elevator operator. The presence of others with radios put him at ease. In his office he found that his co-worker, in a fit of pique over his disappearance, had written an angry screed, and taped it to his computer screen, for all their colleagues to see. He went home, and then headed to a bar. He woke up to a reel of phone messages and a horde of reporters colonizing his stoop. He barely left his apartment in the ensuing days, deputizing his friends to talk to reporters through a crack in the door.
White never went back to work at the magazine. Caught up in media attention (which he shunned but thrilled to), prodded by friends, and perhaps provoked by overly solicitous overtures from McGraw-Hill, White fell under the sway of renown and grievance, and then that of the legal establishment. He got a lawyer, and came to believe that returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation. Instead, he spent eight weeks in Anguilla. Eventually, Business Week had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for twenty-five million dollars, against the building’s management and the elevator-maintenance company, took four years. They settled for an amount that White is not allowed to disclose, but he will not contest that it was a low number, hardly six figures. He never learned why the elevator stopped; there was talk of a power dip, but nothing definite. Meanwhile, White no longer had his job, which he’d held for fifteen years, and lost all contact with his former colleagues. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed.
Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn’t so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work. If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won’t blame the elevator.
Immigrants contributed $229 billion, or 22.4 percent, of New York State’s gross domestic product, in 2006, a new report from the Fiscal Policy Institute finds.
The report, Working for a Better Life: A Profile of Immigrants in the New York State Economy, looks at immigrants’ economic contribution in New York City, downstate suburbs, upstate New York, and the state as a whole. Among other things, it found that foreign-born New Yorkers comprise 21 percent the state’s population — 37 percent in New York City, 18 percent in the downstate suburbs, and 5 percent upstate in 2005 — and that their contribution to the state’s economy is roughly the same as their share of the population.
The study also found that New York immigrants participate in jobs across the entire economic spectrum, that immigrant low-wage workers are subject to the same challenges as U.S.-born low-wage workers, and that the number of Hispanic- and Asian-owned businesses — a rough indication of immigrant entrepreneurship — is growing rapidly. In addition, two-thirds of immigrants upstate and in downstate suburbs own their own homes, while 24 percent of New York children have at least one foreign-born adult in their family.
“This report clearly proves that immigrants fuel growth and vitality in every economic sector and every geographic area in New York,” said New York Immigration Coalition executive director Chung-Wha Hong. “[W]e need to change our immigration laws so that undocumented immigrants can come out of the shadows of the underground economy and future immigrant workers can immigrate legally to fill jobs that our economy requires.”
From the Fiscal Policy Institute Press Release 26 November 2007.
Articles and information for an operatic solo performance prompted by the true story of an undocumented Chinese immigrant who was trapped in a Bronx elevator for three days.
Copyrights from photographs and newspaper articles belong to their respective holders.
Posted by Byron 
Posted by Byron 
Posted by Byron 
Stuart Dempster photographed this sign at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma.
