Six months after my own arrival in this city, when I began a brief stint in 2000 working in the Condé Nast building, I was surprised to see minor incidents from the elevators, or the cafeteria, appear in the pages of The New York Observer, just as a decade before they might have shown up in Spy magazine.
And yet Mr. Taylor also uses scores that he seems to find ridiculously minor (the orchestrated collage of elevator music in "Lost, Found and Lost" is this year's worst offender) or that he exploits theatrically without showing any real affection for (Grofé's "Grand Canyon Suite" in the 2012 "To Make Crops Grow"; excerpts from Smetana's "Bartered Bride" in "Gossamer Gallants").
Injuries were reported as minor and were related to space limitations in the elevator and excessive stretching.
The building's elevators were rated "unsatisfactory" in 17 of 21 inspections the housing authority conducted from 2004 through 2007, city records show, but authority officials said most of those involved minor matters like broken light bulbs or oil leaking from the elevator motor.
The authority's inspectors can grade an elevator only as "satisfactory," meaning it passed, or "unsatisfactory," for minor deficiencies, while leaving citations for more serious defects to their counterparts at the Buildings Department, Ms. Lindquist said.
Authority officials said the 17 unsatisfactory ratings the elevators received in the last 21 inspections were mostly for minor problems like broken light bulbs, but officials have failed to provide detailed inspection records to reporters.
For about two minutes it looks as if Roland Schimmelpfennig's "Arabian Night" is about a minor apartment-building crisis (no water above the seventh floor and a balky elevator).
At the time of the accident, the elevator had failed its last six-month inspection on Oct. 3, 2007, though for minor issues.
(Relatively minor adjustments of vocabulary may, however, be made: an Englishman speaking to an American may employ the word "elevator" rather than "lift" and so on).
Building records show the elevators failed all but one of their last 18 inspections since 2004, though most have been for minor problems.
