The 99 Steps

First, thank you to The Chronicle‘s Brainstorm editors for publishing news about my drawing exhibition. I was both surprised and delighted to see the post!

Here I’d like to tell a little tale about how sometimes big government bureaucrats are the solution.

I first experienced vertical life — i.e., living in a residence in a tall building rather than living in a one- or two-story house — when I moved to New York. The first loft my husband and I rented was a third-floor artist’s loft — a walkup (no elevator) with slanting steps as steep as the flat side of the Matterhorn. At the time, we had a baby, no money, and — fathom this — no washer and dryer. (Laundromat days were especially fun.)

Twenty years ago we moved into the fifth-floor loft we now inhabit. This time, the building had an elevator. It was old, and it broke down a lot, but elevators are to cities what local county roads are to suburbs and rural areas: necessities. True, climbing up to the fifth floor is doable, if you’re young and healthy. But it’s not for everybody else. And even for those who are young and fit, on days requiring three or four trips, or days when you’re hauling five bags of groceries in your cart, it’s a heavy-duty workout.

The fifth floor is nothing compared to the truly high dwelling, however. People who live on the 44th floor of a 50-story apartment building, or even the 12th floor, scoff at me for daring to say I live high up. Yet moving to a fifth-floor loft was pretty scary at the beginning. What if I fell out the window? And with a first-grader to protect, I went overboard in checking that each window guard was properly installed before moving in.

This past April, our building’s old elevator finally died once and for all. Kaput. I wasn’t too worried. Surely the landlord would face the situation and install a new elevator in very short order.

I quickly learned that climbing the 99 steps up to our loft, day in and day out, is a rather vigorous workout. Perversely, I began wishing it were a perfect hundred steps, instead of 99, since the pleasure of counting to a hundred seems infinitely more satisfying than counting to 99. And counting, I learned early on, eased the pain. Count the steps in tens, or twelves, or count backwards, or count in French. I learned to look straight ahead, with my head slightly down. Some days I tried a steady pace and maintained it to the finish. Others I chose to rest briefly at the third floor, or at the second and fourth floors. I abandoned celerity in favor of whatever game worked to make the trip seem shorter. Once I was so involved that I accidentally passed my own floor and climbed all the way to the sixth floor.

Come September, when there was still no elevator, and no sign whatsoever that one was going in, despite repeated assurances from the landlord, I decided that it was time to find out if the law could help.

“Hello,” said a woman’s voice when I phoned the city agency dealing with elevators. Stunned to hear a real person answer the phone, instead of a robot voice, I fumbled my way to an explanation of the problem. The woman with whom I spoke took down all my information and politely informed me that she didn’t know the answer about the law, but that she’d get back to me.

Fat chance, I thought, resigning myself to years of enforced workouts that would clearly culminate in my finally collapsing for good somewhere around the 83rd step.

Surprise. The next day the woman returned my call. Yup, she called me back, just like she said she would! Mean or lazy bureaucrat? Not this one. My elevator angel not only clearly explained the precise city law pertaining to elevators (landlords in Manhattan are required to provide elevator service in a building my size), she also provided me with the phone number of the office I should call to file the complaint to get the landlord to comply with the law.

Surprise yet again. I called the number she gave me and again a real human voice answered. (What a pleasure to call an agency and have a human voice answer, by the way.) This one said that an elevator inspector would be at the building the next morning. Surprise again. The elevator inspector showed up the next morning, as promised.

A few significant fines later, and the landlord moved into high gear. Construction is now well under way — although installing a new elevator is a big deal, and we won’t see a functioning elevator until late December or even January.

It’s dawned on me several times during my hike to my home that city people like me pay lots of money to belong to a gym where we then work out like mad on Stairmasters. You’ll have to take my word for it — climbing up five steep flights of stairs just plain isn’t the same.

New York City is a very big city. And yet some of its bureaucrats, unlike those at my bank, my phone company, or my cable television company, answer the phone themselves and get things done very efficiently. Big government isn’t always bad.