The shortest magazine pitch of Nick Paumgarten’s life actually took place in an elevator, which the writer was sharing with an elevator-phobic editor, and consisted of a single word: “Elevators!” The article that followed, in April, 2008, is titled “Up and Then Down.” It is the story of a man named Nicholas White—who was trapped in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill Building, in midtown Manhattan, for forty-one hours—and also a study of “elevatoring,” a delicious word for the discipline of designing vertical transportation.
A long piece about elevators might sound a little dry, even for a magazine that once published a forty-thousand-word article about oranges. (“What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down?” Paumgarten asks, coquettishly.) But, as Gerard Manley Hopkins nearly said, there lives the dearest freshness up down things. Paumgarten’s story is a parade not only of fascinating facts—there are, or were, fifty-eight thousand elevators in New York City; the super-fast elevators in the Taipei 101 Tower are pressurized to prevent ear damage; all door-close buttons in elevators built after the early nineteen-nineties are designed not to work—but also of indelible similes. In speeded-up CCTV footage of White stuck in the elevator car, he looks “like a bug in a box.” At thirty-two hundred feet, a hoist rope will snap “like a stream of spit in a stairwell.”
In one passage, Paumgarten notes that passengers “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.” Ever since Paumgarten’s article came out, I have not shared an elevator without remembering the dots on a die and feeling a jolt of pleasure.
“The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war,” Paumgarten writes. (Pretty good, that.) When I first read those words, I was twenty-eight and living in London. Except for two copses of skyscrapers in which our financiers—and finances—go up and down, London remains a fairly horizontal city. It’s easy to spend a busy week there without riding in an elevator. To Paumgarten, elevators were ostensibly banal; to me, they seemed exotic.
His narrative structure, too, contains tensile strength. The reader is introduced to White’s entrapment, and then, just as White is contemplating his own death, diverted to learn about elevatoring before returning to his story, and so on. The subject matter goes up and down; the narrative breathes in and out (with just the right amount of anxiety). I am not the first or the last writer to have borrowed Paumgarten’s template.
Lurking behind the vertical fun is tragedy, which lends the piece an unexpected power. “Up and Then Down” mentions 9/11: we learn that some two hundred people were killed in elevators on that day. But, in a broader sense, the article is about the fear of being trapped up high. People who work in skyscrapers have always found it psychologically necessary to forget about the physicality of towers. September 11th reminded us, horrifically, of what a tall building is; in its playful way, “Up and Then Down” does, too. It’s striking that “Man on Wire,” the gorgeous and vertiginous documentary about Philippe Petit’s wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, was touring film festivals when Paumgarten’s piece was published.
When I’m in New York, I often feel like the pig in “Babe: Pig in the City.” I’m continually baffled by American tipping protocol; I get on an express when I need a local. Imagine my gratitude to Paumgarten, then, when I first visited The New Yorker’s current offices, at One World Trade Center. The elevators there are “destination dispatch,” which, per “Up and Then Down,” assigns “passengers to an elevator according to which floor they’re going to.” I’d never ridden a destination dispatch before. A fresh opportunity for humiliation awaited. But, thanks to Paumgarten’s sideways instruction manual, I knew what to do. ♦
Late on a Friday night, Nicholas White got stuck on an elevator in a nearly empty office building.
