From Nina Koenigsburg

As a taste of what came up during the conversation on Jan. 10th, here is an e-mail we got from one of the participants:

First, thank you so much for such a lively and fascinating evening on Thursday. You, Wendy and Lonnie are to be congratulated for pulling off what I thought would be impossible - getting 25 strangers to talk to each other like old friends....The elevator guys:
When I first moved to Washington Heights, the three elevators at the 184th Street entrance to the A train were fully staffed. People saw the same elevator operator each time they rode the elevators to or from the station and consequently developed relationships with them. Some of these relationships seemed to be of long standing.Many staff members played music on boom boxes and it seemed to me that whatever the music, people seemed happy, even if it wasn’t necessarily themusic they would choose. One elevator operator in particular, Bruce Renfew, who had been working at that station for many years, was a knowledgeablejazz afficionado and I always looked forward to riding in his elevator. In addition to playing wonderful music, he decorated “his” elevator with pictures of children from the community and their pets, collected canned food during food drives and always had a smile and pleasant word for the harried commuter. Because of these operators, there was always a little humanity during an otherwise dreary commute. People smiled at each other, struck up conversations with strangers, held doors for each other, said good morning, good evening and thank you to the operators and generally showed acivility on a regular basis which is noticeably absent from the city. In about 2003, the MTA cut back the operators from three operators to one. Almost overnight the two unstaffed elevators became graffiti-ridden and strewn with garbage, despite the attempts by MTA personnel to keep them clean. Far worse was the loss of communityand civility by the elevators’ patrons – few people talk to the operators, who change sofrequently it is rare to see the same person twice, people no longer hold doors for theirfellow riders and few say thank you to the operators or to each other when doors are held. I believe that the fabric of our community was inexorably altered by the absence of these men and women.
Nina Koenigsberg