Ed Caesar talks about Nick Baumgarten’s “Up and Down.”

The shortest newspaper article of Nick Baumgarten’s life occurred in an elevator, which the writer shared with an editor who suffered from elevator phobia, and consisted of one word: “Elevators!” The article that followed, in April 2008, was titled “Up and Down.” It’s the story of a man named Nicholas White—who was trapped in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill building, in midtown Manhattan, for forty-one hours—and also a study of “lift,” a delicious word for the discipline of vertical transportation design.

A long article about elevators might seem a bit dry, even for a magazine that once published a forty-thousand-word article about oranges. (“What is there to say, besides that it rises and falls?” Baumgarten asks arrogantly.) But, as Gerard Manley Hopkins almost said, there lives the dearest freshness in the highest things. Baumgarten’s story is not just a presentation of fascinating facts—there are, or were, fifty-eight thousand elevators in New York City; Taipei 101 Tower’s high-speed elevators are pressurized to prevent ear damage; All door-closing buttons in elevators built after the early 1990s are designed not to work, but they are also indelible analogies. Speedy video footage from surveillance cameras shows White stuck in the elevator car, looking like a “bug in a box.” At thirty-two hundred feet, the hoist rope would snap “like a stream of spit in a stairwell.”

In one passage, Baumgarten notes that passengers “instinctively know how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at isosceles distance, until the fourth enters, at which point passengers three and four will spread out toward the front corners, making room, in the middle, for the fifth, and so on, like dots on a dice.” Since Baumgarten’s article came out, I haven’t taken an elevator ride without remembering the points on the dice and feeling a jolt of pleasure.

“The elevator, underestimated and overlooked,” Baumgarten writes, “is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war.” (That’s very good.) When I first read these words, I was 28 and living in London. Except for the two floors of skyscrapers that our financiers and our money ascend up and down, London remains a fairly horizontal city. It’s easy to spend a busy week there without taking an elevator. To Baumgarten, the elevators were apparently ordinary; To me, it seemed strange.

Its narrative structure also contains tension. The reader is introduced to Wyatt’s trap, and then, just as Wyatt contemplates his own death, is made to learn how to lift before returning to his story, and so on. The topic rises and falls. The narrative breathes in and out (with just the right amount of anxiety). I am not the first or last writer to borrow Baumgarten’s template.

Behind the vertical joy lies a tragedy, which lends the piece an unexpected power. “Up Then Down” mentions the events of September 11: We learn that about two hundred people were killed in elevators that day. But, in a broader sense, the article is about the fear of falling into a high trap. People who work on skyscrapers have always found it psychologically necessary to forget the physical nature of the towers. September 11th reminded us, horribly, of what a tall building means; In its hilarious way, “Up and Down” does that too. Remarkably, “Man on Wire,” the brilliant, vertiginous documentary about Philippe Petit’s walk on the wires between the Twin Towers in 1974, was touring film festivals when Baumgarten’s article was published.

When I’m in New York, I often feel like the pig in the movie Babe: Pig in the City. I am constantly puzzled by American tipping protocol. I get a fast train when I need a local. Imagine my gratitude to Baumgarten when I first visited The New Yorker Current offices, in One World Trade Center. The elevators there are “destination dispatch”, which, in “up then down”, assigns “passengers to the elevator according to which floor they are going to”. I had never ridden a destination mission before. A new opportunity for humiliation was waiting for him. But thanks to Baumgarten’s sideboard instruction manual, I knew what to do. ♦

Late Friday night, Nicholas White was stuck in an elevator in a nearly empty office building.