The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around 11 o’clock on a Friday night in October 1999. White, a 34-year-old production manager at BusinessWeek, 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 Manhattan offices were on the 43rd 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, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the 39th 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.
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, 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. He decided that he’d better not do anything more 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.
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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 79th 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 75th 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. 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—as opposed to those lifted by hydraulic pumps—are typically borne aloft by six or eight hoist cables, each of which is capable on its own of supporting the full load of the elevator plus 25 percent more weight. Another line, the governor cable, is connected to a device that detects if the elevator car is descending at a rate 25 percent 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 200 people were killed in elevators at the World Trade Center on Sept. 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 out of an elevator car when it is stuck between floors.
Nonetheless, elevators are extraordinarily safe. An average of 26 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. 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, 60 million people move into cities—the numbers will go up, and up and down.
Elevator design is rooted in deception, aimed at disguising the fact that tenants are tethered to a system over which they have no command. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early 1990s, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works.
Nicholas White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at 40 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.
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. He imagined them opening the doors, 10 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 were scrawled three “13”s. It was a dispiriting sight. His being an express elevator, there was no egress from the shaft for many stories up or down. He could make out some light far below. A breeze blew up the shaft.
He started to call out. “Is there anybody there? I’m stuck in an elevator!” He kept at it for a while.
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.
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. Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, calls an 18-inch space between people “intimate distance”—the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. The standard elevator measure provides less space than that. “Elevators represent a special circumstance in which pedestrians are willing to submit to closer spacing than they would normally accept,” says John J. Fruin in the 1971 classic Pedestrian Planning and Design. Fruin didn’t much parse the question of willingness.
At a certain point, Nicholas White decided to go for the escape hatch in the ceiling. 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.
(The escape hatch is always locked. A vertical-transportation axiom states that if an elevator is in trouble, the safest place to be is inside the elevator. By law, the hatch is bolted shut from the outside. It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out.)
Some time later, 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.
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 f--- out of here!” White shrieked.
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 41 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 some friends he had planned to meet two nights earlier, along with a couple of security guards and a maintenance man. His friends turned to see him and were appalled at the sight; he looked like a ghost, one of them said later.
White never went back to work at the magazine. Caught up in media attention, 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. Eventually, BusinessWeek had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for $25 million, 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 15 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, 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 will not blame the elevator.
From a longer story that originally appeared in The New Yorker. ©2008 by Nick Paumgarten. Used with permission.
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