It was 8 a.m. in Ramón Rivera’s elevator and the morning rush was on. The buzzer rang.

Mr. Rivera glanced at the ancient-looking indicator board.

“Ooh, we’re going to the penthouse!” he said. A little white flag had popped up behind the letters “PH.”

He pushed the control handle to the left. The elevator, a little mahogany-paneled palace on vertical rails, rose past floor after floor, numbers sweeping by behind the gold scissor gate.

On the way up, the buzzer sounded again; a white flag popped up behind the 8. Mr. Rivera, a courtly man with a silver mustache and a navy blue uniform, put his face up to the door as the elevator sailed past the eighth floor. “I’ll be right back,” he called softly.

There are 69,381 passenger elevators in this vertically obsessed city, and nearly all of them promise a journey about as exotic and exciting as making toast. You get in, you push a button, the doors open a few seconds later at your destination.

But there remain quite a few machines, manually controlled and chauffeur-driven, where climbing aboard is more like taking a short trip on the Orient Express.

Mr. Rivera’s elevator is in a wedge-shaped Venetian Gothic tower overlooking Prospect Park in Brooklyn, but others can be found in many neighborhoods where old customs persist, notably along the grand boulevards of the Upper East Side and the more formidable reaches of the Upper West.

On Fifth Avenue, where the hand that guides the elevator wears a white glove, there is a car painted with Renaissance-style angels and gods and goddesses; it’s like riding in a king’s coffin. On West 67th Street just off Central Park, the elevator man at the Hotel des Artistes building rests between trips in a carved wooden throne beneath a mural of ships in the harbor. In Brooklyn Heights, a lurid red-and-gold chamber described by the building manager as “a little bordelloesque inside” comes complete with black leather divan suitable for a reclining odalisque.