The air is hot and still as a man with a cello strapped to his back steps into a lobby where cracks meander across the vaulted ceiling and several of the light bulbs need replacing.
Up ahead, light spills from a waiting elevator car. A hand holds open one of the doors; its owner smiles and says: “Be careful. Watch your step down.” The gold-and-burgundy interior brings to mind a box seat at the opera.
Moments later, the doors clang shut. A shudder. A lurch. The rattle of an unseen chain. The elevator rises.
Man and machine in imperfect harmony. One can’t exist without the other. Soon, neither will exist at all at South Michigan Avenue’s Fine Arts Building.
Among the city’s last human-operated elevators, the Otis cars are expected to be replaced in the next two years with modern counterparts.
“We have been holding on to them as long as humanly possible and the time has finally come. Truly, it’s harder to get the parts and it’s far more expensive to maintain,” said Jacob Harvey, managing artistic director for a building that first opened in 1898 and was built to display and repair Studebaker carriages and wagons. (New York had the very first Otis passenger elevator in 1857, powered by a steam engine.)
But it’s going to mean the loss of something the tenants — puppet makers, piano teachers, yoga instructors, dancers, luthiers (not to mention countless tourists and architecture enthusiasts) — have held dear for decades.
The staccato thrust of a violin bow or the flutter of a soprano practicing scales are heard daily in the building. The elevators — three of them — make their own music. That’s particularly true when an operator hauls a big fan into one of the non-air-conditioned cars.
“You can hear that thing three floors away — like a swarm of bees,” said Brian Feeley, who has been operating the elevators for 11 years.
The lobby is named after one of the most beloved operators, Tommy Durkin, an Irish immigrant who manned Elevator No. 1 for decades, beginning in 1950. His bronze likeness smiles at visitors from a plaque on a lobby wall. Durkin was the connective tissue between the tenants, some of whom have preferred to keep to themselves in studios behind frosted glass windows. He was a lover of all things University of Notre Dame.
“We always rooted for Notre Dame, whether we liked them or not,” said Liz Stein, a saleswoman at violin-maker and dealer, William Harris Lee & Co., a long-time tenant.
Waclaw Kalata likes to rub Durkin’s bronzed nose for good luck. Kalata, 63, has been running elevators in the 10-story building for about 30 years. He’s a muscular Polish immigrant with slicked-back, silver hair and a smile warm enough to melt the icicles that dangle from the building’s pink granite facade in winter.
Kalata isn’t a man of many words. All these years later, he’s still uncomfortable with English.
In the basement, where he takes his lunch — a home-grown cucumber, an apple and a little tub of pork liver pate — he’s delighted to share snapshots of his native Poland and his grown-up children, all three of whom live in the United States. A faded portrait of Pope John Paul II hangs from the wall.
In Car No. 2 — No. 1 broke down and hasn’t operated since last year — Kalata rests a hand on the nub-like handle that sets the elevator in motion. He nudges the handle to bring the car level with the floor. When an elevator is jam-packed, a descending car has been known to drop as much as two feet below the requested floor.
“Saturday, I like to work because kids are coming,” Kalata says. “Kids — they like the elevators.”
By which he means the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras players piling in with their instruments. Capacity is 2,000 pounds, or three double basses and their musicians — fewer if they bring their parents and siblings, he says.
A previous elevator operator enjoyed belting out arias when he rode the car alone.
But the current crew is less showy.
“Italian beef or tacos?” one tenant, seeking a lunch recommendation, asks Feeley.
“You can’t go wrong with either,” replies Feeley.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that Kalata and his colleagues don’t jabber too much.
“We [riders] always have a joke: You can’t go to work and be in a hurry,” says Stein, 64. “Sometimes I’ll wait for an elevator during my lunch break that takes about as long as my lunch break. That’s part of the charm.”
Dozens of times a day, Kalata is asked what he’ll do when he’s no longer needed in Car No. 2. Management has said there will be other jobs for all four of the operators. Kalata doesn’t know what the future holds.
He shrugs, when asked. He might spend more time in his native Poland, he said. He was there recently for about a month. He couldn’t wait, he said, to get home to Chicago — to the people and to his elevator.
