The first thing you notice is the scale of it. Not the grandeur of the lobby you have just crossed, not the marble underfoot or the gilded ornament overhead, but the elevator itself: it is larger than it has any reason to be. There is room for ten people comfortably, perhaps fourteen in the way that public buildings once assumed groups might actually want to stand together rather than press against opposing walls. The ceiling is high. The walls are panelled. It feels less like a conveyance than a room that happens to move.
The operator is already seated when the doors open, perched on a stool immediately to the left, in the particular posture of someone who has been doing this long enough that the waiting between floors has become its own kind of occupation. He is unhurried. The evening's performance has not yet begun, and the lobby behind us still holds the sound of several hundred conversations happening simultaneously, the particular acoustic of a civic building in use. He says nothing until we are all in. Then he asks which floor.
I have taken this elevator more than a hundred times over the years. Every time, something about it insists on being noticed.
The Control Panel
To the right of the door, immediately inside, is the control panel. I had looked at it before without asking about it, which is a habit of public buildings: you accept what is there without inquiring into its history. This time I asked.
The operator explained the mechanism as it used to work. You turned the crank one way to ascend. You turned it the other way to descend. You centered it to stop, which opened the doors. The original system ran on direct current drive, a technology that was standard in commercial buildings of the 1930s and that allowed the kind of variable-speed control the operator was describing. The system required constant attention and constant calibration. You were not pressing a button and waiting for the machinery to do its work; you were in conversation with it, making continuous small adjustments that aligned the cab with the floor. Get it wrong and the landing was uneven. Get it right and the car arrived level, the doors opened, and the passenger stepped out onto the floor they had requested.
I asked when the elevator dated from. He placed it in the 1930s. He gave a year, which I remember as 1936, though I have since learned that the elevators in the building are original to its 1932 construction: Otis cars custom-engineered as part of Brown and Lansburgh's design, integrated into the core of the 300,000-square-foot complex to service every level from the backstage loading zones up through the administrative floors. What the operator remembered as a later date may have been a mechanical update, or simply the way time collapses inside a building that has changed slowly and continuously for nearly a century. The War Memorial Opera House opened in October 1932, during one of the worst years of the American Depression, as the first municipally owned opera house in the United States. Four million dollars in civic bonds had made it possible. TIME magazine, at the opening, called it "easily the most attractive and practical building of its kind in the U.S." The elevators were built by the architects of the building itself, which means they were never an afterthought. They were part of what the building was designed to be.
The Building
Arthur Brown Jr. trained under Bernard Maybeck and at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris before returning to San Francisco to design, among other buildings, City Hall. The Opera House, completed in 1932 alongside the matching Veterans Building across the Memorial Court, employs what the War Memorial describes as the classical Roman Doric order in a form deliberately restrained for its commemorative function. One of the last Beaux Arts structures built in the United States. The cornerstones of both buildings were laid on November 11, 1931, Armistice Day, with a sealed time capsule and inscriptions honoring those who served in the First World War. The building was a memorial before it was a theater.
The lobby has a 38-foot ceiling and proportions that make every person who enters it smaller in a way that does not feel diminishing. The effect is the opposite of intimidation; it is the feeling of having arrived somewhere that was built to receive you, that considered your arrival worth preparing for. Civic architecture at its best has always worked this way. It does not say that you are unimportant. It says that the occasion is important, and that you are part of it.
The building has survived an extraordinary amount. The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 caused serious structural damage and forced the Opera and Ballet companies into temporary venues while a complete seismic retrofit was completed in 1996 and 1997. The retrofit used viscous dampers to increase seismic resistance while preserving the historical fabric of the building. Five hundred thousand linear feet of architectural elements were restored; the foyer, the proscenium, the mezzanine boxes were all re-gilded. The elevators were mechanically overhauled during the same restoration: the original direct-current drives replaced with variable frequency drives and regenerative braking, more efficient and more reliable, though the cars themselves remain. The building that came back was, by most accounts, structurally safer than the original and as close to it visually as contemporary conservation could manage. The elevator operator was still at his stool when it reopened. Some things you do not retrofit.
In the spring of 1945, with the war still running in the Pacific, the San Francisco Conference met here. The document that came out of it established the United Nations; the charter itself was signed in the Herbst Theatre next door. In 1951, the treaty restoring Japanese sovereignty was drafted and signed in these same buildings. The War Memorial Opera House has a relationship with the history of the twentieth century that most performance spaces do not. Opera was performed here through all of it.
The Evening
We were there for The Barber of Seville. Rossini at the San Francisco Opera is not a sedate occasion; the company has a tradition of intelligent and exuberant production that makes the comedies particularly enjoyable. But this is not an article about the opera. The opera was the reason we were in the building. What I keep thinking about is the elevator.
The old control panel is no longer the primary means of operation. The building has been updated where updating was necessary. But the panel is still there, mounted on the right wall of the cab, and the operator knows how it worked because at some point in the history of his employment here, someone explained it to him and he understood that the explanation was worth retaining. This is how institutional knowledge moves: not through documents but through the patience of someone who thought another person might want to know.
What Old Buildings Keep
There is a category of service that exists in old civic buildings and nowhere else. The elevator operator is one of them. The coat check attendant with a paper ticket and a numbered hook. The program seller at the top of the stairs. The usher who has been directing people to row L since before your parents were born and who knows, without consulting anything, whether the seat you are looking for is on the aisle or at the center. These are not roles that exist because they are efficient. They exist because a building of a certain age and ambition was designed around human presence at every threshold, and the humans who filled those roles were never replaced because no one could agree on what should replace them, and gradually the replacement ceased to feel necessary.
The staffed elevator does something that an automatic one does not. It slows the ascent to the pace of conversation. The operator asks your floor. You tell him. He turns, or adjusts, or moves the control, and the cab rises at a rate that is not optimized for throughput but calibrated to the scale of the building. Somewhere between the lobby and the Dress Circle, you have a moment that is neither entrance nor arrival: a pause between the street and the stage, the ordinary and the ceremonial. The building was not thinking about efficiency when it was designed. It was thinking about experience.
This is not an argument that everything old is better. Automatic elevators are more reliable, more accessible, and serve more people more consistently than any staffed car could. The case for the staffed elevator is not efficiency. It is the interruption of ordinary movement by a moment of directed attention. You are going somewhere specific, escorted by someone who knows the building, delivered to a floor with the implication that the floor matters and the occasion of reaching it matters. The transaction is not purely logistical. It carries a small charge of ceremony.
Intermezzo
The word itself names this: the interval between. In opera, the intermezzo is the music played between acts: not the main event, not incidental, but the bridge that holds the structure together and allows the audience to arrive at what comes next with the right quality of attention. The building full of intermezzi: the lobby between the street and the auditorium, the elevator between the lobby and the upper floors, the program read in the minutes before the lights go down. Each transition a preparation for what follows rather than merely a path to it.
The elevator at the War Memorial Opera House has been making this preparation for a long time. It has carried the audience to the Barber of Seville and to Tosca on opening night in 1932 and to productions spanning nearly a century, through depression and earthquake and war and renovation. The man on the stool has not been there for all of it, but someone has. The stool has been occupied through most of what has happened in this building, which is itself a record of a kind.
The doors open. The operator says the floor. We step out into the corridor, into the sound of the pre-performance crowd settling, into the particular smell of a theater about to become a theater. Behind us the doors close. The elevator returns to wherever the building needs it next. The performance is about to begin. Everything that preceded it was, in the best sense of the word, the intermezzo.