End of an era Stingl: City losing its last human-run elevator.
Last call for Milwaukee’s final human-operated elevator that will be switching to self-serve
An elevator ride at the Century Building downtown came with a greeting, a bit of small talk and even a treat if you happened to have a dog along.
No more. Milwaukee is losing its last passenger elevator operated by a human being. The building at the corner of Wells and Old World 3rd streets is going with automated trips up and down its eight floors.
For most of us, self-service elevators have been the norm this century and much of the last one. We push the buttons and technology does the rest.
But the ornate elevator at the 93year-old Century Building has been like a time machine. You stepped in and found a man or a woman waiting there to get you where you’re going. Milwaukee once had many elevators run like this, and some still exist in New York and other cities.
“It’s the end of an era. It makes me sad,” said Sharon Fitzpatrick, a legal secretary at Legal Action of Wisconsin, which has offices on the 7th and 8th floors. She has come to know and like the Century’s elevator operators during her 30 years working in the building.
It used to be that all eight floors were bustling with offices and other commercial uses. Recently, the third through six floors have been converted to 44 apartments. A selfservice elevator was needed for 24hour use, and it should be operational within days.
One of the building owners, Cal Schultz, said efforts were made to keep the elevator’s vintage look. But it will be fully automatic with updated mechanicals.
That means the last remaining full-time operator, Jim Wodke, and two part-timers will be out of a job. Monday is the final day.
I spent an hour with Wodke, watching him work and asking him questions like how many trips he thinks he’s made.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t count that high.”
No doubt it’s many thousand. He started in 1992 as a vacation fill-in, then worked weekends, and in 1997 was hired full time. His shift in recent years has been weekdays from
noon to 8 p.m.
He has a chair in the Otis elevator closest to the Wells Street entrance. That’s his office. The middle elevator was a backup and more recently used for construction, and the third elevator on the far left is now the automated one and the only one that will be running.
Wodke also has been the building greeter who kept an eye on the lobby. He liked that there were no bosses around most of the time. He liked the Christmas bonuses the operators used to get from tenants, though those have dried up over the years.
He won’t miss the elevator jokes, like the job having its ups and downs. He also won’t miss the people who pressed the call button over and over because they mistakenly thought it should be lighting up. It makes a surprisingly modern-sounding chirp that sometimes causes riders to check their cellphones.
“And I’ve been accused of, ‘Is this your job? What are you doing in here?’ ” he said. Sometimes people would walk right around him and press what they thought was a button for a floor they wanted, but was actually just a light indicating a floor where a rider was waiting.
People often compare his old elevator to the Tower of Terror thrill ride at Disney World or something they’ve seen in movies. He and passengers have been stuck a few times, but nothing too scary.
Wodke recognized most of the folks who got on during my riding time and didn’t need to ask for their floor choices. He closed the glass outer door and the gate and operated a rheostat lever to go up or down, being careful to stop precisely at floor level.
The elevator was not heated or airconditioned, so even the brief rides could be chilly or toasty. Wodke used a small fan and kept a can of air freshener handy for odors that lingered after riders exited. Personal service, they call that.
Not once did Wodke feel car sick from all that vertical riding, though he gets woozy from amusement park rides that go horizontally.
Wodke is 62 years old and rides the bus to work from the east side. He plans to look for another job. “I could be a Walmart greeter,” he says.
One of his predecessors in the elevator gig was Al Silva, who let everyone know what a huge Elvis fan he was. People working in the building chipped in to send him to Graceland, and when Al died, a lot of them attended his funeral.
That’s the relationship that blossomed between the elevator operators and riders.
“It’s almost like you were in ‘Cheers’ or something,” said Legal Action chief financial officer Michael Maher who, like Sharon Fitzpatrick, has worked at the Century Building for decades.
They and others there will need to get used to the modern elevators most of us take for granted.
“It’s a new day,” Maher said. “Things are always changing.”
“You call the elevator and it gets there,” Fitzpatrick said. “You press the floor you need and you ride up. We’re going to start doing that, and it’s going to feel strange.”
Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Connect with my public page at Facebook.com/Journalist.Jim.Stingl