Opening doors

In a building in Manhattan where I’ve spend a great deal of time, one man opens the door and a second man rings the elevator button but never actually enters the elevator. In another building across town, one man helps push along a revolving door while another sits at the security desk. It is, in fact, more difficult to go through a revolving door when someone is helping push it along than to go through the door unaided, just as it is easier to push an elevator button than to wait as someone’s arm blocks yours and prevents you from pushing it yourself.

But the point of living in a doorman building is not about ease of entry-and-exit, or even about safety. In most doorman buildings I've been in, familiar-looking people are let up without question. This means that a psycho ex—the person most likely to cause problems—will be let up, while a delivery guy will be given the third degree. No, the point of living in a doorman building is the same as having an apartment with a “WBF” (wood-burning fireplace) or hardwood floors—it’s something you’re supposed to want, that increases the value of your home, but that is rarely considered on its own merits. Is it actually that much better to have someone open the door for you?

Having tried both, I much prefer living in a non-doorman building. I don't really like paying people to do things for me that I could do for myself, things that the person doing them for me knows I could do for myself. It makes me feel silly to have a door opened for me, like the doorman is thinking, "Look at the princess who can't even open her own damn door," even if I am not a resident of the building and thus had no choice in the matter of who would open the door. I cannot make my own damn jeans, cannot make my own damn cappuccino and still get to work on time; those things I feel OK about paying for someone else to accomplish. But I have two functioning arms, a basic knowledge of key-and-door mechanics, and see no reason for the division of labor to introduce itself into the door-opening part of my life.

For the same reason as middle-class and above residents of New York City at times choose non-doorman buildings over ones with doormen, many are drawn to the Park Slope Food Co-op, an institution which provides lower-priced organic or otherwise yuppified groceries to members who work a certain number of hours every four weeks [or is it month?], such that the store is staffed entirely by its own shoppers. This utopian ideal manifests itself with women standing around one of the prettier main streets of brownstone Brooklyn, wearing fluorescent guard vests with the same designer jeans worn by women on the Upper East Side shopping at Citarella or Grace’s Marketplace.

Is it better for those who can to pay for services they could provide for themselves? Members of the Co-op—some very well-off-looking, and many undoubtedly well-off, given housing prices in the area—prefer to staff their own supermarket, partly to pay a bit less for (allegedly) better food, partly so as to avoid putting themselves in an awkward overclass-underclass situation. But if they put up with this awkwardness, they'd add new jobs to the neighborhood, jobs needed by people who do not consider bagging groceries a charming escape from the world of corporate law, who are not looking for the sense of community empowerment that comes from heaving organic oats with your fellow man, but who want to get paid by the hour for doing legal, safe work.

Aesthetically, I prefer not to see a largely minority service sector serving rich whites. Walking down Park Avenue and seeing blond babies getting pushed around in strollers by poorly-dressed (or, worse, uniformed) black or Filipino women does not make me especially thrilled with the status quo. But which of these two possibilities—an in-demand service sector with snooty sorts making the demands; or an enlightened, self-sufficient bourgeoisie— better contributes to social mobility?

According to the New Yorker piece on doormen, sociology professor Peter Bearman believes that the existence of doorman buildings does not make the socioeconomic gap between doormen and residents any greater. For every dollar that goes to a doorman, it’s a dollar that could not go to the education of resident’s children, and one that could go to the education of the doorman or his children. While this sort of trickle-down may be irrelevant in the buildings on Park in which residents can send large families through boarding school, college, and beyond with ease, not all doorman buildings house the super-rich, and some doormen are also students or are otherwise looking to opportunities to move beyond opening doors, literally.

Living in a community of high-rent walk-ups and DIY grocery stores is a lot like going to a tiny liberal arts college with left-wing pretensions, but where no one without a spare $120,000, a high future earning potential, or an opinion about foreign film will ever be encountered. Everything looks as it should, but somehow, something is not quite right.