The New Elevator

Our school building just entered the late Twentieth Century with the installation of a new elevator in the east wing. For the four years that I've been a teacher in the building of the old Bushwick High School in Brooklyn, I had grown accustomed to the very old style, manually operated elevators. In September of 2006, I stood open-mouthed as the elevator door opened revealing a little gentleman in a guayabera shirt asking, "You going up?" I stepped into an art deco car that had to be as old as my mother and watched as Sanchez pushed up on a bar closing the door and swiftly pushed the brass collapsible gate across the threshold of the car with his left hand. With his right, he pushed down on a wooden handled crank that started the motor and cables lifting us with a high-pitched whooping noise to the fifth floor. It was right out of the movies. It was right out of my earliest childhood memories, when my mother took me to places unknown that had elevators with human operators who asked people which floor they'd like to go to.

Sanchez greeted me every morning with a hearty "Buenos dias, profesór!" A year later he retired and we've had two elevator operators since. This year the NYC Department of Education finally replaced one of the elevators with a typically smaller, but more functional, automatic elevator. It operates with the use of a security card in order to keep students out of it, but it is certainly less attractive than the old one and not as interesting. I no longer get to watch the insides of the shaft, its large green doors passing with each floor. It feels claustrophobic as an unnatural sounding beep goes off and an LED indicator notes our location. Other than that, there is no discernible motion. I miss the rush of air as we headed for the fifth floor. I miss the rattle of the brass gate that enclosed the entrance of the car and allowed me to feel that I was a part of the infrastructure of the old building. Most of all, I miss the human face of the old elevators: the man in the smart guayabera, the big guy who replaced him, and the nice Nigerian fellow who who always had a smile and a "God bless you" as I left the elevator for the day's classes. I miss the ways all three handled students trying to get an unauthorized lift. The new elevator's okay, but it just doesn't have personality.