Goodbye, Fine Arts elevators

Sad news from the Chicago Sun-Times: so-called modern elevators will soon replace the manually operated elevators in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building:

“We have been holding on to them as long as humanly possible and the time has finally come. Truly, it’s harder to get the parts and it’s far more expensive to maintain,” said Jacob Harvey, managing artistic director for a building that first opened in 1898 and was built to display and repair Studebaker carriages and wagons. . . .

But it’s going to mean the loss of something the tenants — puppet makers, piano teachers, yoga instructors, dancers, luthiers (not to mention countless tourists and architecture enthusiasts) — have held dear for decades.

Those elevators are a wonder. You step inside, and there’s an operator to talk to. It’s a strangely intimate form of travel. Here, from The Columbia Chronicle, is a brief tour.

The last time Elaine and I were in the building, we were deeply under the spell of Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, whose protagonist visits the building several times:

Exactly at ten o’clock she went into the Arts Building and told the hall porter she had an engagement with Mr. Sebastian. He rang for the elevator, and she was taken up to the sixth storey.

*

She always started very early for Michigan Avenue, and had an hour or so to walk along the Lake front before she went into the Arts Building.

*

The city was very sloppy on the morning after the snow-storm, and Lucy did not take her usual walk along the Lake; she was afraid of splashing her new dress. She went straight to the Arts Building. How glad she was to greet the hall porter, and to step into the elevator once more!

And so on.

Elaine and I took the elevator to the tenth (top) floor and walked down, looking at door after door. And at the tile. And at a radiator. And at the elevator button.