Ed Caesar on Nick Paumgarten's "Up and Then Down"

"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."

"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.""

Nicholas White was trapped in a Midtown Manhattan elevator for forty-one hours, and the incident anchors an examination of vertical-transportation design and culture. The account layers engineering details — roughly fifty-eight thousand elevators in New York City, pressurized super-fast lifts in Taipei 101 to prevent ear damage, and nonfunctional door-close buttons in elevators built after the early nineteen-nineties — with observations of human behavior and memorable similes. Passengers' instinctive spatial arrangements inside elevator cars are likened to the dots on a die, and CCTV imagery portrays the trapped man as "like a bug in a box," blending technical facts with unexpected poetic language.

Read at The New Yorker