Ordeal by Altitude

The machine stopped. And suddenly in Manhattan's lofty apartment buildings, 200,000 dwellers, some of whom are lords of a sizable part of creation during business hours, seemed as flustered and helpless as unshelled hermit crabs. Local 32-6 of A.F.L.'s Building Service Employes was on strike. Elevators stopped running, coal furnaces went out, and matrons were forced to open taxi doors themselves.

All along Fifth and Park avenues, proud doormen shucked off their uniforms and donned picketing signs; their shoulders drooped perceptibly. Out of uniform many turned out to be shabby, nondescript men.

Businessmen labored up 20 flights of stairs, got to their apartments breathing heavily and looking as disheveled as molting chickens. Garbage piled up outside kitchen doors 26 floors above the street. No mail or newspapers flipped down outside the doors. Grocery boys refused to make high-altitude deliveries, and floor neighbors who had never before spoken got together to pool food supplies.

Docile Manhattanites, who put up with soot, noise, water shortages, snarled traffic and the subway rush hour, generally accepted their new ordeal philosophically. Tenants stopped to chat with the strikers, who wanted their work-week reduced from 48 to 40 hours, and $2.75 a week more for it. The landlords chatted with each other. They claimed that they were going broke, that they could not afford any added expenses unless there was an end to rent control. Their stand endeared them to neither the 12,000 strikers nor the tenants.

At week's end, the landlords gave ground; they agreed to submit the issues to a fact-finding commission. Strikers ripped off their picketing signs. Soon the streets were once more loud with the shrilling of doormen's taxi whistles.

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