An unexpected downside to living in New York is a fear I’m not even sure there’s a word for: I’ll call it elevator-phobia. I live many floors up and it can strike at any time, but in particular on windy days; when one of my building’s two lifts is undergoing maintenance; on random visits to the towers of midtown; or, most acutely, on opening a copy of the New York Post, paper of record for grisly elevator accidents across the city.
In August, on the East Side, a man was crushed to death while exiting a lift in the lobby of his apartment building, trapped between the wall of the shaft and the lift itself, when it plummeted suddenly towards the basement. A few years earlier, a woman was killed in similar fashion while boarding an elevator in a Madison Avenue office building. I have read everything there is to read about these accidents and have concluded that, in the event of the lift moving while I’m boarding or exiting, the best strategy is to shrink back in the direction I came from.
My phobia is completely irrational, as is the fear of having an accident in the first place. Every year in the US, a relatively tiny number of people are killed or injured in elevators – and in New York, a city of some 58,000 elevators and 11 billion elevator trips a year, it represents a minuscule proportion of all accidents.
Still, the fear persists. Like subway folklore, a healthy subsection of New York mythology is entirely devoted to elevator life, including the greatest lift story ever told, by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker many years ago: that of a man trapped in a midtown lift for 41 hours, wrestling with the possibility of his own death like the New York City version of Jacob’s Ladder.
During the recent blackout in the city, the first thing many of us thought about was the fate of those caught in elevators between floors. As most New Yorkers buying an apartment know, the city’s fire department ladders stretch, at their highest, to the 8th floor of most buildings, and plenty of people refuse to live higher. When I first moved to Manhattan I lived on the 36th floor, and every single day, on entering or exiting my building, I had to suppress a surge of dread. It was not a happy experience.
It is a fear connected, I suspect, to the anxiety felt during a plane’s takeoff, landing or turbulence – that is, to the suspicion that this thing we’re riding in defies laws of nature. I once rang the physics department of Manchester University to check out the theory that, in the event of an elevator plunge, if I timed my jump accurately I might overcome the effects of impact. Right? The physicist laughed and pointed out you’d have to jump 200ft in the air to counteract the force of a freefall landing.
My children have a friend in a neighbouring building who lives on the 29th floor. We visited her for a playdate this week and, as our ears popped on ascent, I felt the familiar spike of alarm. When the elevator doors opened, I clutched my children’s hands and jumped over the threshold like Mary Poppins jumping into the chalk pavement picture. And there it was, the thought I can never quite suppress: that the only force keeping this thing up is my own magical thinking.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
