If you’ve ever seen the film The Apartment, you’ve probably noticed how in the large high-rise office building in which most of the story is set, there are not only manual elevator operators, but also that the operators aren’t allowed to take their elevators up until the dispatcher signals that they have enough passengers. The dispatcher uses a small metal clicking device to notify the operators. The female lead in the movie, Shirley McLaine, is the dispatcher. For a long time, the film was the only place I’d ever seen an elevator dispatcher, but recently I’ve seen another movie that had one, in a similar setting.
We know that a few old places in NYC and elsewhere have elevator operators, but are there still any that have elevator dispatchers in the largest buildings?
I don’t know the answer. I doubt high any high traffic elevators require an operator anymore. Most of the operators are fulfilling long term contracts, or are provided as a convenience, and only pushing buttons for people anyway. I imagine there are some old elevators with manual control, but I imagine that number is dwindling rapidly.
Yes, I believe some large buildings still have elevator starters, whose job it is to ensure the most efficient use of elevators during peak times, when travel is often primarily into or out of the building. They don’t have to be manual elevators, either. Westinghouse Selectomatic systems apparently often included override controls of some kind, as you usually see the starter standing at a panel bearing that name. Modern solid-state controllers can be programmed for different traffic patterns at different times of day, and other sophisticated patterns, but that was beyond the capability of electromechanical relay controllers.
There was indeed a hierarchy of elevator operators up until at least the mid 1970s to the best of my knowledge. Even with automatic elevators. Probably due to the contracts TriP mentioned. The captain or starter even had a cooler uniform with epaulets on the shoulders so you’d know he’s in charge. Never saw a clicker though. Just hand signals or nods.
It’s years since I’ve seen the film, but if I recall correctly the plot proceeds on the assumption that everybody tacitly understands that the elevator operators - all women - are appallingly badly paid, so much so that they pretty well have to supplement their income by semi-prostituting themselves to the company executives.
Women can get better-paying jobs nowadays. Since it’s hard to add value to the work done by an elevator operator, I don’t see the real wages rising. I’d expect the profession to be all but extinct.
There was a business in downtown San Francisco that had an elevator operator as the building had a tenant on the second floor and the store was on the ground level, third and fourth floors. To prevent wayward shoppers from bothering the other tenant, the store posted an employee in the elevator to press the buttons.
Apparently, endlessly paying someone about $10.50 an hour (SF minimum wage) was cheaper than installing a keyswitch or other control on the elevator buttons.
AFAIK, the Smith Tower in Seattle still has manual elevators and operators.
We have a much better system where I work. In the elevator lobby is a keypad upon which you punch in the number of the floor you’re going to. The keypad then beeps at you and displays a letter indicating a particular elevator. That elevator will then take you to your floor. The elevators themselves have no buttons, except for the necessary emergency switches. This allows much greater efficiency; two people going to the same floor at the same time will always be directed to the same elevator, and the system can plan clustered routes with the least travel time before returning to the lobby.
We’ve the same where I work but it works poorly for us. I think it’s down to poor algorithms and people not using the system correctly (eg pressing the floor you want to go to numerous times so the system thinks there are a number of people waiting there).
I vaguely remember visiting an older building in Lower Manhattan with a manual elevator and an operator. I think it may have been the Puck Building, although this was about 18 years ago.
The subway station at 168th St. in Manhattan is one of the few (only?) stations where you have to use an elevator to get in and out of the subway. I have no idea if there are stairs to be used in an emergency, but when everything’s normal you must use the elevator, and I hate it.
And there’s a person that sits in that elevator all day… and waits for people to get on… and pushes the button… and waits for people to get on… and pushes the button. He’s got a chair and usually a newspaper, and he’s blocked off by a little yellow plastic fence (it’s a really big elevator).
As much as I hate the 20 seconds of riding the thing, I can’t imagine what it must be like to sit there all day.
MacLaine is just an elevator operator. See the movie at about 17 minutes in.
Really? As I see it, the plot proceeds on the consequences of saying no to one’s superiors in an office hierarchy. I find that part of the plot truer to my life than 25-year-old MacLaine serving as just an elevator operator.
Yes, you’re right. I should have remembered it would be hard for the dispatcher to interact with the other characters of the story. But am I totally misremembering, or is there another woman in the ground floor lobby scenes who wears a uniform and does that signaling thing with the clicker, or cricket, or whatever you call it?
I could be wrong, but within recent memory, the Congressional office buildings in W.D.C. had manually operated elevators.
The starter/elevator operator distinction is a classic union racket to make sure that multiple guilds get paid for a single transaction. Much like you couldn’t get anything done on Broadway without paying a Teamster, a stagehand, a lighting guild member . . . the extortionate nature of unions lies in large part in demanding the ability to carve a single transaction into multiple tolls.
No, you’ve got that part correct. She has a line later in the movie when
Fran’s taxi-driver brother-in-law shows up at the office to find out where Fran is. He walks into the lobby and tells the starter, “I’m looking for Fran Kubelik.” She says (in a startlingly deep voice), “So am I! She didn’t report for work this morning!” Then he asks who he can talk to, and she tells him to see Mr. Dobisch on the XXth floor.
But that thing about elevator operators prostituting themselves to the executives is so far off base that it’s not even in the ball park. UDS, you need to watch it again!
In any event, it appears that unlike a lot of occupations, e.g. public elementary school teaching, the occupation of elevator operator was not particularly feminized–really more the reverse so far as I can tell. And there wouldn’t have been the gender-discrimination based lowballing of wages on the assumption that women didn’t need to earn “real” salaries. For what it was, being an elevator operator was probably a decent gig.
OTOH, the subtext suggested by UDS, is not altogether impossible in the sense that anyone’s free to imagine this mechanism at work, but I don’t think it was intended by the film’s producers.