Cairo’s Antique Elevators, Glorious and Glitchy, Are Scenes of Love and Fear

Cairo’s Antique Elevators, Glorious and Glitchy, Are Scenes of Love and Fear

When you live in downtown Cairo, a neighborhood of European-meets-Egyptian facades in various states of faded grandeur, roundabouts whizzing with traffic and storefronts patchworked in riotously mismatched signage, it helps to cultivate a certain tolerance for features like relentless honking, rundown real estate and geriatric elevators.

Hager Mohamed was willing to brave the first two. The last, not so much.

Over a few months living downtown earlier this year, Hager, 28, surrendered to an elevator’s whims more often than necessary for most inhabitants of the 21st century. Partly it was her phobia of antique elevators, with their cabs of gleaming wood and glass suspended from very visible cables in rib cages of metal grillwork; and partly it was the specimen in her apartment building: It went up, but refused to go down without some control-box fiddling. The residents failed to organize maintenance until it stopped working entirely; even once fixed, it would descend only as far as the second floor.

But the building was conveniently located. And, well, she lived on the fifth floor.

“Now we live on the sixth floor in a building with no elevator,” said the sociology Ph.D. student. “It’s exhausting. I only realized the value of that elevator when it