This story was updated on Oct. 27 at 6:30 p.m.

During peak hours, the first floor of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center is filled with students. They stand in lines stretched out the door with art materials in hand, pleading for their time to squeeze into one of the seven elevators.

The New School students have long voiced concerns over excessive wait times and frequent “Out of Service” signs posted in front of elevators.

Each elevator at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center can carry roughly eight students, not including their art projects and materials. With over 12 floors, the amount of students traveling at the same time causes congestion daily. They have expressed that long lines, service breakdowns, and express elevator systems increase their stress levels and cut class time. 

Long wait times don’t only affect those in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center;  the Albert and Vera List Academic Center is just as bad during peak hours. 

“They are really inefficient,” Sophia Laia said, a third-year screen studies and theater student at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. “It’s insane sometimes. Every time I’m at the [Vera List] building, [there are lines].” 

She said the delays affect her classes. “[The elevators] make me late to class all the time, there are always people 5 to 10 minutes late,” she said. “We start a few minutes late every class.”

Between Oct. 13 and 14, two different elevators in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center were out of service. These outages are frequent occurrences on campus. 

“We have so many elevators that, invariably, at least one goes down at some point during any given day,” Safety and Facilities Vice President Thomas Whalen said. Whalen works with The New School buildings department and oversees elevator maintenance.

“Most of the time it has to do with the door mechanisms,” he said, “They’re repaired quickly.” 

Alexandra Barycza, a second-year fashion design student at Parsons School of Design, said whether it’s five or ten minutes before class, she experiences lines every time. “I feel very impatient with the elevators,” she said. “One time it was down, and I waited 15 or 20 minutes.” 

First-year communication design student at Parsons Chloe Herkelt said she and her classmates are often late to class because of the elevators in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center. 

“[The elevators] definitely have an impact on tardiness,” she said. Early in the school year, many first-years arrived late, unaware they needed to factor in elevator wait times. Over time, students have adjusted.

While students attending classes primarily in the University Center, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, or Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall often avoid long lines, those with classes at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Albert and Vera List Academic Center face a very different reality before every class. 

“It can be stressful sometimes,” Andrea Horbury said, a first-year communication design student at Parsons. “You’re a little worried you’re not going to make it to class.” Horbury added that the waits are frustrating but she gets why. “I understand that it’s difficult to accommodate so many students in the building.” 

Whalen said the elevators have limitations. “We’ve got a certain number of people traveling to certain places at the same time. It becomes a matter of how many people can the elevator handle within a period of time.”  

The university attempted to address long wait lines over a decade ago. 

As the New School Free Press reported in the spring of 2015, two of the Albert and Vera List Academic Center’s elevators were changed to express elevators that stopped only on the ninth floor. Stairs going between the 6th and 12th floors were put in with the expectation that students would walk the rest of the way. The university eventually limited the express service to only peak hours, operating the elevators as regular at all other times.

While the university believed these changes would help, waits at the Albert and Vera List Academic Center remain lengthy. 

“If we were in a relationship, I’d break up with them,” Herkelt said.

A previous version of this article incorrectly named Fire and Life Safety Director Paul Gottlieb as a source. The correct name of the source was Safety and Facilities Vice President Thomas Whalen.