A Commonplace Book

The arrival of the elevator upended more than urban planning: It changed the hierarchy of buildings on the inside as well. Higher floors had once been distant, scrubby spaces occupied by maids and the kind of low-rent tenants who could be expected to climb six flights of stairs. The more important people climbed at most one or two flights, which gave brownstone-style homes, for instance, their high-ceilinged parlor floors. While the arrival of elevators didn't change this right away--the top floor of Henry Hyde's building was occupied by the in-house janitor--the upper reaches of buildings eventually became desirable. The elevator ushered in the end of the garret and the beginning of the penthouse, as lawyers and businessmen came to appreciate the advantages of having beautiful, bird's-eye views and respite from the loud noises of the street. Hotel owners, meanwhile, started turning their top floor rooms into their nicest ones. They could even rent out their roofs for garden parties where guests could survey the glittering new city, all without doing a bit of work to get there.

Elevators also raised new questions of etiquette. According to [Lee] Gray [a columnist for Elevator World and an associate professor of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte], the author of a 2002 book on the early history of elevators, one big issue was whether a man in an elevator ought to remove his hat in the presence of a woman, as he would in someone's home or a restaurant, or keep it on, as he would on a train or a streetcar. The question, says Gray, reflected a basic uncertainty about what this space really was--a mode of transportation, or some kind of tiny moving room.

That was only one of the peculiar uncertainties that came with riding elevators. Another was that they felt simultaneously public and private, taking people out of the broader world while locking them into a narrow, self-contained one alongside a random assortment of colleagues, neighbors, and strangers. By bringing together people who often only kind of knew each other, elevators created vague expectations of interaction--a smile, a nod, even a bit of small talk to acknowledge that everyone on board lived or worked in the same building.

When Bernard began researching his book, he was interested in finding the moment when all that anxiety and ambiguity finally went away. "What I wanted was to go directly to the threshold, where it changed from this alien thing, to something which is completely normal," he said. But after years of research, he came to a surprising conclusion: That moment of normalcy never came. "It turns out we still live on this threshold," he says.