You hear the stairwell before you see it. The door opens and the sound rises up through five floors of concrete and steel and hits you like walking into a church you did not know was there. The stairwell has the best acoustics in the building. The stairwell has the best acoustics in the neighborhood. Architects did not design it that way. The concrete and the narrow walls and the vertical shaft create a natural reverb that no recording studio has ever been able to duplicate exactly because the stairwell was not trying to sound good. The stairwell just sounds good because of what it is.

Doo-wop started in project stairwells in the Bronx and Brooklyn in the nineteen fifties because four teenagers with no instruments and no money and no rehearsal space discovered that the stairwell between the third and fourth floor made them sound like a cathedral choir. The Flamingos rehearsed in stairwells. The Moonglows rehearsed in stairwells. Frankie Lymon was thirteen years old singing in a stairwell on 165th Street in Washington Heights before he ever saw the inside of a recording studio. He walked into that studio and the producer said you sound different and Lymon said that is because there is carpet on the floor. The stairwell gave him the sound. The studio took it away and replaced it with something smaller.

You stand on the landing between floors and you are between. You are not on the third floor and not on the fourth floor. You are in the in-between space and the in-between space is where the sound lives. Every note you sing goes up and comes back down changed. The stairwell adds something to your voice that your voice does not have alone. The echo is not repetition. The echo is collaboration. The building is singing with you and the building has been singing longer than you have been alive.

In Havana the solar buildings have open stairwells that run up the center of the structure and the music from every apartment pours into that shaft and mixes. Son and rumba and Yoruba drums and a radio playing Beny More all swirling together in the vertical space between the floors. The stairwell is not a hallway. The hallway is horizontal and the hallway has a destination. The stairwell is vertical and the stairwell has levels. You climb and the sound changes. You descend and the sound changes. The stairwell is the only room in the building where the acoustics depend on where you are standing.

You take the stairs because the elevator is broken again and on the way up you hear someone three floors above you singing something you almost recognize. You stop. You listen. The voice comes down through the concrete shaft and it is not a performance because the singer does not know you are there. It is just a person climbing stairs and singing to themselves and the stairwell turns that private moment into something public without either of you meaning it to. The stairwell does not ask permission to share what it hears. The stairwell takes every sound and sends it everywhere at once. The stairwell is the most honest room in the building because the stairwell cannot keep a secret.