DATELINE: CINCINNATI : Elevator Operator Gets Lift From Job : One-time drab workplace has become a home away from home for Cincinnati woman.

There is no privacy in Maxine Quinn’s home. All day long, scores of friends and strangers traipse through her doors and tramp over her worn carpet. They stare at her walls, sniff at her decor, giggle at her keepsakes. Some have the temerity to ask her to change the channel on her television.

This might be tolerable if there were a bedroom to slip off to or some nook to hide in. But the place in the heart of downtown Cincinnati where Maxine Quinn spends each day is a one-room flat that moves.

Quinn’s home is an elevator, or more precisely, an elevator that has become her second home. Over 11 years as the elevator operator in the Conrad Building, an old eight-story building filled with photographic and jewelry firms, Quinn has turned her drab, creaking elevator into a tiny residence, furnished with television, lamps, table and chairs, its walls decorated with art, kitsch, Hollywood mementos and a changing assortment of family photographs.

“You have to be comfortable, right, honey?” Quinn explained as she maneuvered from the eighth floor down toward the first. “As long as it doesn’t offend anyone, why not?”

There are no complaints. Since she decided 11 years ago to decorate the lift on the premise that “if I was going to spend so much time here, I might as well feel at home,” Quinn has become a familiar figure in downtown Cincinnati. This is a town that seems to have adopted a live-and-let-live attitude toward its local characters--among whom are controversial Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, beloved for her independent streak and reviled for her admiration of Adolf Hitler, and baseball legend Pete Rose, expelled from the sport for gambling and now a popular radio personality.

“This can be a pretty starchy place, but there’s also a streak of tolerance here for people who don’t always fit in,” said Mendy Lefton, one of the owners of the Conrad Building and Provident Camera, a first-floor photographic supply firm. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a complaint about Maxine. Tell you the truth, she’s pretty indispensable around here.”

At the first floor, three children and a mother in tow hesitated when the elevator door opened. Before them sat Quinn, a heavyset woman with a strand of fake pearls, watching Sally Jesse Raphael on her television. Overhead, two fans whirred and an electric lamp illuminated a table where Quinn sometimes sips coffee while waiting for the inevitable buzz from above.

“Is this the elevator?” asked 9-year-old Josh Bray before his mother shushed him. Then the elevator creaked upward. “Cool,” Josh said before he was hushed again.

Everything on Quinn’s wall has a story behind it. There are multiple magazine cut-outs of actor Robert Mitchum, “my heart-throb.” There are grainy old photographs of Quinn wearing a fake leopard-skin stole, far thinner than she is today, “somewhere in my 60s.” There is a framed black-velvet portrait of Elvis, donated by a local artist who sometimes pays Quinn $100 to act as elevator operator for private art showings.

“This is all part of my life here,” said Quinn, who perches on one of three chairs crammed inside the elevator. So much of the elevator’s floor space is taken up by her possessions that Quinn can only take a maximum of five people from floor to floor. “Three,” she adds, “if they’re really huge.”

Cincinnati elevator inspectors have regularly assessed the elevator’s safety during periodic checks. But “we’ve never heard one peep about Maxine,” Lefton said. And besides turning the building’s heat on and off each day, she also lets Lefton and his brother, Barry, know about “suspicious characters who wander in here sometimes.”

There are less frightening types who wander in as well, people who have heard about Quinn’s elevator and simply want to take a ride. Senior citizens pop in to fill out a boring afternoon--and become regular visitors. Families who have stumbled upon Quinn’s regular Christmas decorations--candy canes, blinking lights and tinsel--now call up the Leftons every December to plan return visits.

Quinn is not sure how much longer she will be able to stay on the job. Already, the son of the building’s mailman spells her at least one day a week.

When Quinn finally retires, the unresolved question is which of her two homes she will retire to--the flat she lives in at night or her beloved elevator.

“I’ll tell you,” Quinn said, going up, “if I could sleep here, I might just never leave.”