Big City: Did You Give the Doorman Enough?

What this means is that even after you’ve rifled through the data and researched the gratuities administered by your neighbors and friends, you don’t know what you don’t know. Your superintendent could tell you what Mrs. Parsons in 5F gave him, but presumably he won’t. And Mrs. Parsons, if you ask her, is likely to abstain from the truth.

This habit of dishonesty is confirmed in “Doormen,” a generalized but thoroughly convincing book about the relationships between Manhattan doormen and tenants, by Peter Bearman, a Columbia University sociologist. In a chapter devoted to Christmas tipping, Mr. Bearman determines that people frequently understate the amount they are giving for the purpose of driving down the contributions of others, and thus distinguishing themselves as among a building’s more generous residents.

I would argue that people also say they give less to assuage the guilt of others who may not be giving as much (unless they are zealous members of online parenting forums, in which case inducing guilt becomes a mandate of human existence).

If Mr. Bearman were to arrive at Christmas dinner and listen to you fret about whether you tipped your doorman or your super sufficiently this year, he would not quell your anxieties but, instead, tell you that they were utterly justified. Tipping, in this view, is a complicated affair in which it is virtually impossible to establish uniformity. Tipping too little is embarrassing, but so is tipping too much, which can come with distasteful implications of hierarchy and servitude.

This past week, I set out to speak to doormen on the Upper West Side, and I can say that not one of them complained about the indignity of having been handed too much money in recent weeks. At the Austin, on West 79th Street off Columbus Avenue, where Nelson Pacheco has been a doorman for 24 years, tips have gone down over time as more renters have occupied the condominium building, he told me. He was one of the few willing to be quoted by name on the subject of tipping.

The practice of combining apartments is also not welcomed by many doormen, because it reduces the number of tenants adding to the December bounty. There is concern as well about newcomers to the city who are not inculcated in the folkways of tipping. Some years back during the holidays, one porter told me, he received cookies from a tenant who had just moved to New York. “By the next year, she’d learned to do the right thing,” he said.

Tipping is affected by an infinite number of variables, not the least of them personal affinity. Most doormen will tell you that everyone tips something at Christmas, but that’s not quite true.

“My husband used to stiff doormen he was angry at — not pay our sullen, sluggish doorman anything some years,” a Riverside Drive resident said. “I wouldn’t have done it, but I came to feel all right with this. He wasn’t any more sluggish or sullen after he’d been stiffed.”

Geographical distinctions still play out significantly, as well. Another West Side doorman, Guarionex Mendes, suggested that it was more lucrative, and infinitely more pleasant, to work for older people uptown than for younger people downtown. A doorman at the Manchester House for four and a half years now, he previously worked in a building on Park Avenue South.

“Young people are going 100 miles an hour,” he said. “They race past you, ‘Hi, doorman.’ They don’t worry as much.”

Doormen acknowledge that there is still much more money to be made at the end of the year on the East Side than on the West Side, and that getting to Park Avenue is often the goal.

“This, you have to understand, is a working-class neighborhood,” Bruce Madrazo, by all appearances a much-beloved West 79th Street doorman, said.

A doorman new to life in a prewar co-op on the Upper East Side confirmed that Christmastime in the employ of such a place means, as he put it, “horse loads of money.” Although he’d worked at this co-op for only a few months, he’d already received $4,000 in gift money as of last week, and many tips were still to come. As it happens, half the people in the building increase their tips, annually, based on seniority; so, the doorman said, he could look forward to making even more money in the years ahead.

That the city’s economy is so reliant on a culture of mercurially determined generosity, from the absurdities of Wall Street bonuses on down, is, in the end, merely another mark of its extremely shaky relationship to the egalitarian.

At the turn of the 20th century in New York and elsewhere around the country, a movement took hold to abolish tipping. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, thought the practice “unwise,” and other union leaders spoke out against tipping on the grounds that it suppressed wages and turned workers into supplicants.

“I detest this ‘tipping’ custom; it is base, wrong, unjust and degrading,” L. T. Van Fleet, secretary of the barbers’ union, said in the late 19th century.

“It is more manly,” he concluded, “to earn your living than to receive charity or bribes.”

Leaving manliness out of it, the salary cap for unionized doormen in the city is $42,000 a year, making the dependence on holiday tips significant. Surely some doormen are friendlier than others, and some more discreet, but in general it does not require a vastly different skill set to open the door of a building full of $6 million apartments than to open the door of a place where real estate is considerably cheaper. When we reward doormen at a higher rate on East 84th Street than on West 23rd Street, what we are rewarding is simply the ability to get closer to money.

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