One floor at a time, she gave City Hall its humanity
By MARY JO MELONE
Published June 29, 2003
A repairman recently told Hortensia Sotomayor that the elevator she runs has started and stopped nearly 2-million times over the near-century it has ferried people up and down the eight floors of Tampa's old City Hall.
It is a matter of pride in the building. People say, and I have no way of disproving it, that this is the last manually operated elevator in Tampa. If so, Sotomayor is the last full-time elevator operator.
Time for both is running out.
The elevator is about to be replaced. Sotomayor, if she doesn't retire, will have to find something else to do at City Hall.
The building, on the National Register of Historic Places, was constructed in 1915. That's 88 years. Sotomayor has operated it for 22 years - one-fourth of its storied existence.
There's nothing much grand here. Step inside the elevator and the universe is dark and cramped. You have no plexiglass-covered view of the world to peer through, as in a modern elevator. There's no graffiti to decipher.
Sotomayor works from a metal stool in the back of the car, where she sits once she has pulled the gate shut and thrown back the arm on the side that sends the elevator up or down. She talks in a mix of mostly Spanish but some English to her riders. She reads the newspaper. She makes her own world.
Her day starts early. The first person she sees most days is city attorney Fred Karl, who comes in about 7:30 a.m. and works on the eighth floor.
Karl is one of the reasons the elevator is being modernized. At 79, he suffers from Parkinson's disease and diabetes, and he wears a pacemaker. The old elevator breaks down often and there's already been one occasion when he had to walk all the way to the top - not an occasion he wants to repeat. He ha also had to walk down, a task that he describes as just as difficult, when the elevator shuts down at 5:30 p.m.
Karl compares the elevator to a whistle in a factory, in the days when people worked in factories, and whistles blew to get them to work and blew to discharge them. People all but have to set their clocks to the elevator and just pray that it won't conk out, Karl said.
Tampa City Hall was restored some years ago and the elevator was left with all its charming detail. Thursday, City Council approved the money to modernize the elevator. The plan is to keep the parts that gave the charming look - the gate and the crank arm - but disengage and replace them with modern elevator operation devices. Still, the essential look of the elevator would be maintained.
Sotomayor would get to hang around, too. Even though she is 70, even though she knows no other work in government other than working the elevator, Karl said city officials would find her another job in government that suited her if she wanted it.
She is, after all, part of City Hall's history - in more ways than one.
Up above where the elevator makes its last stop, at Fred Karl's office, sits the City Hall clock. For years the clock has carried a name.
The clock is called Hortense, a matter of pride for Hortensia Sotomayor. The world isn't brimming with Hortenses.
The clock honored Hortense Oppenheimer Ford, who raised $1,200 toward its purchase when City Hall was built. The clock still gongs reliably each hour and reverberates across downtown.
Every time the clock strikes, Hortensia Sotomayor is reminded of the tie she has that takes her back nearly 100 years in Tampa history.
She jokes that even though her job may be lowly, she has great worth.
The city has put out a request for contracts to bid on replacing the elevator. The city expects to spend $150,000. That's what it will cost to replace the work of one woman, always cheerful, going up and down, down and up, answering questions, giving directions, stopping at every floor or only one, doing her part to make the city run.
