It probably started as a joke. Or an idle comment, at least: you can easily imagine George Weems, a practical midwestern engineer — a company man, a Lutheran, personally picked by Cass Gilbert to help design the elevators for the Woolworth Building in 1910 — hearing the sonorous clang of the newly strung cables, and remarking that it sure sounded like someone up there was trying to send a message.

His utterance gets repeated, growing into a well-crafted anecdote, for which Weems is now cast as the gifted son of a Western Union man, who’d been raised to recognize the ‘good fist’ of an experienced telegraph operator, and can now conclude with certainty that behind the knocks in the shaftway is a palpable intentionality. Of course management sends a man to investigate, and wouldn’t you know they choose Ayrsley McMurdo: an efficient operations manager, but also a crossword enthusiast, lapsed Jesuit, and burgeoning spiritualist who attends a weekly séance. It’s not long before McMurdo commissions a series of mechanisms, seamlessly integrated into the building’s Gothic Revival architecture, whose secret purpose is to isolate and identify patterns in what are now twenty-six banks of elevators in the 58-storey building. Legend has it that McMurdo’s devices recorded the sequence ‘pr-tioes--v-e--rbvmmevme--s--t’, thought to have meant ‘per actiones verbvm mevm est’ — ‘by your actions, my word is...’ — but we’ll never know. You can’t believe the things you hear in elevators.

Published December 14, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.