Essential employees
THE shadow of the angel of annoyance passed over the city, and we were afraid. It looked as if the doormen would strike. “Doormen” is headline shorthand for residential-building workers–the 25,000 doormen, porters, handymen, and elevator operators who keep 3,500 buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens going. (Three thousand supers belong to the same union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, but since many of them work under a contract that runs until June, they were not due to walk.) The doormen wanted more health insurance, the building owners wanted a wage freeze. In days of yore gentlemen rowed to Weehawken and shot each other. These days workers stay home, owners stay put, and everyone shoots the tenants. The last strike ran for twelve days in 1991, but we all know the drill.
Mr. and Mrs. Suburban, on their divot of lawn, are Adam and Eve, or the archetypal property owners of Blackstone, who wield “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” Apartment dwellers live in a vertical village, an immobile caravan in the urban desert. My apartment building–early Sixties, white brick, dull and solid as a TV business show–has twenty storeys. Subtract one for the non-existent 13th floor, and another one for the first floor, which is all lobby and rented space. There are just under 16 apartments per floor (the number diminishes slightly at the top). Assuming 3.5 people per apartment, balancing widows and families, there are about a thousand tenants. Six days a week the mail is delivered; every day of the week the Chinese takeout is delivered. All but the infants and the ill go in and out; ditto their dogs. Housekeepers, baby sitters, lovers, psychoanalytic clients, cable guys, family members from out of town (all smiles and slowness), must be announced. Hot and cold air, gas and e-mail, water and excrement, appear and disappear at command. Some of these services are subcontracted out, or performed by utilities, but most of them aren’t. It takes a lot of on-site activity to keep a building running.
My building has one super, one handyman, four doormen, and three porters. There are no elevator operators, except the tenants themselves on the not-infrequent occasions when a sluggish door has to be shoved shut in order to prick the elevator into motion. Every Christmas everyone gives the building workers cash, in little envelopes with oval portholes for the presidents to peek out. We do it willingly, for the many services the workers perform. When the reading lamps from the Reagan administration give up the ghost, they install new ones. When the Kennedy-era knob on the medicine-cabinet door pops out of its mirrored base, they find another. When the refrigerator dies, they replace it, not with a brand-new one, of course, but with a working one scrounged from the basement or some other property. We could conceivably do all these things ourselves, though it would mean shlepping to Canal Street or Jersey. So there’s no way. We gratefully surrender the burden to them.
A building’s doormen mark the eddies of ethnic succession. When I moved in, in the late Seventies, the senior doorman was Irish-American. When he retired, the next in line was a son of Italy. Now we have eastern Europeans and Hispanics. I have read that a lot of buildings in the south Bronx employ Albanians. Yo, posses, stay out of those blood feuds. The weather is a safe, and perennially interesting, topic for everyone (for fellow tenants too, in those brief Quaker meetings of elevator rides). But many doormen have specialized interests. One loved the Yankees, one loves dogs. Another asked me about John J. Miller’s book on the Olin Foundation.
When labor and management push back from the table, irreconcilable, the building changes its character. When it is fully manned, it is snug and serviceable; if not quite home, then the home of home, the place we find the place we live. When the doormen go on strike, comfort and familiarity are withdrawn. The building becomes an indifferent, perhaps hostile, shelter, something out of Robinson Crusoe or The Castle. Defoe’s hero met strangeness head-on, gamely taming it. Kafka’s hero despaired.
Tenants sign up for emergency duties. Garbage can no longer be thrown down the chute to the compactor. It must be collected in plastic bags on each floor, then brought down to the basement, and hoisted to the street out the garage door. Tenants sit at the front door, screening visitors–a thankless task, since inevitably someone fails to leave notice for a housekeeper, and isn’t home when you call on the intercom. The housekeeper came all the way from Queens (ultimately, from Ecuador); she is only six floors from her goal; but unless you or some exiting passerby recognizes her you have to bar the door. It is at these moments that you realize you really don’t know anybody in the city, or at least nobody around you. In the country, my friend told one person in the morning that he needed a new chainsaw. That day, every person he met asked what had happened to his old chainsaw. In the city we are monads (anagram: nomads) passing in the night. We could have a tenants’ committee, but those have to be organized by old Jewish teachers, and they’re dying off. As the building slowly fills with tweenies and their squeaking girlfriends, any possibility of organization goes glimmering.