There was a time when every tall building in America had a man in a uniform standing inside the elevator, a brass lever in his hand, saying the same two words a thousand times a day: Going up. He was called the elevator operator, and for seventy years he was one of the most familiar faces in American life.
The job was harder than it looks. An operator had to stop the car level with the floor — within a quarter of an inch — using nothing but feel. He had to know the building's rhythm: when the lunch rush came, which floors got busy, which executives liked silence. He remembered faces and names. In the great department stores, the elevator operator was a kind of concierge. He could tell you which floor had the gloves, where the tearoom was, and whether the third floor was crowded.
There was a quiet etiquette to the ride. Men removed their hats in the elevator. Conversations stopped when the doors opened, because everyone could hear everyone. For a few seconds, strangers stood shoulder to shoulder, and the operator was the one person who was always there, always calm, always knowing where everyone was going. In some buildings he watched a thousand careers rise and fall: the young clerk who became president of the company, the receptionist who never came back.
Then came the automatic elevator. First in new buildings, then everywhere. The operators disappeared in a single generation — by 1980, they were almost gone. The brass levers were ripped out, the uniforms folded away. The elevator, once a place with a human being at its center, became an empty metal box that takes you up without a word.
We removed the operator for efficiency, and we gained a little speed. But we lost something too — the small, daily encounter with a person who knew your name, who held the door, who said going up and made the vertical trip feel human. Today we have remade the elevator operator a hundred times: the customer-service bot, the checkout machine, the autopilot. And yet, sometimes, when the doors close and the floor numbers climb, it is strange to realize — no one is saying going up anymore.