Coit Tower is a one-elevator monument. The elevator goes up. The elevator comes down. From the moment it opens its doors at 10 a.m. until it closes at 5:30 p.m., Manny Salgado is the only person allowed to push the button.
He has been pushing that button for 32 years. He started on May 4, 1993, a Tuesday. He has missed eleven shifts in 32 years, all of them for the funerals of family in Mexico City. He keeps each missed day, with the relative’s name and the date, in a small index-card box at home.
About 700 people ride up with Manny on a typical summer day. About 200 on a typical winter Wednesday. The total, by his own count, is north of three million tourists since the spring of 1993.
He greets each rider in their first language. He has learned eleven greetings and the count for the floor button in eleven languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian. He can also count to twenty in Tagalog and ask politely for the destination floor in Hindi, but those came later and he does not list them officially.
His method is the first two words. He listens as people step in. “Two please,” in English with a southern lilt: South Carolina, possibly North. “Dos boletos por favor,” with the soft -s: Mexico City or Guadalajara. The Cantonese tone slides differently from Mandarin; he distinguishes them by the way the speaker handles the falling tone at the end of a word.
He has been wrong, by his own admission, three times in the last nineteen years. Once a Belgian woman addressed him in French and he answered in French; she had been raised speaking Flemish and was, she explained, simply French-educated. Twice he assumed Japanese where the rider was Korean. Both Korean riders forgave him.
“A tourist tells you everything in the first two words,” Manny says. “The trick is to listen before they ask. By the time they ask, they have already chosen which version of themselves to be in a strange city. I want to greet the version they would have used at home.”
Manny grew up in the Tenderloin. His mother cleaned hotel rooms at the Mark Hopkins for 28 years. His father drove a city sweeping truck for the SFMTA. He went to Lincoln High School, briefly to City College, then took the Coit Tower job at age 32 when his second daughter was born. His daughters are now 41 and 33. The older one is a public defender. The younger one is a high school Spanish teacher in San Diego.
On the morning I rode with him at 9:14 a.m., before the doors had officially opened, he was practicing. He has been studying Vietnamese for four years on a podcast he listens to on his commute from Daly City. He has not used it on the elevator yet. He says the day will come. He wants to be ready.
At 10:02 the first tourists arrived. Three of them. A Brazilian couple and a man from Australia. Manny said good morning in Portuguese, then in English, in the right order. They did not notice. The elevator went up.
