Life In A Lobby Of The Upper West Side

The author Sara Badilini is a student at the Columbia University Journalism School.

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — On a recent afternoon, Howard Alonzo Brown, 29, smiled beneath his blue face mask while adjusting the cuffs of his uniform as he prepared to welcome the residents living at 271 Central Park West on the Upper West Side, where almost every afternoon, he works as a doorman. His colleague, who just finished his shift, jests with him, making big mouths behind the glass door, while Brown jokingly rolls his eyes.

The building has a regal facade, with visible bricks, a white ledge with floral bas-relief carvings and tall Greek columns on the front wall. But it still remains low-key compared to other more eccentric developments nearby, with their carved balconies and marble window sills. Most of them have a little vestibule covered in grey or burgundy carpeting at the entrance, where flower bushes greet residents and golden umbrella holders await rainy days. Most days, passersby near Central Park can see a doorman patiently waiting with hands on their lap, occasionally nodding to those walking by .

Not unlike his colleagues in the other buildings, every day that he reports for duty, Brown wears a dark blue suit with gold finishings as a uniform, with the address of his building where a breast pocket would typically be. He starts his shift outdoors, looking up and down the street to see if one of the residents, who he now recognizes from far away, is coming. Once they show up at the door, it is his job to open it and welcome them into the lobby, a marble wide room with golden finishes. A shiny wooden desk stands in the center of the room, and since the pandemic started, it has become a sanitizing station for everyone who enters the building. Every new visitor must fill out their contact information on a piece of paper attached to a clipboard, a contact tracing effort in case there’s an outbreak of COVID-19.

The chandelier, with its minimalist flower motif, spreads a dim light over the lobby’s red velvet couch and antique mirror; and it reminds many of the famous art nouveau paintings and brings first-time visitors back to 1912, when the building was constructed.
Brown and his colleagues spend a significant portion of their shifts in the elevator, porting residents up and down the 13 floors to their apartments. It is a manually-operated elevator, and Brown pulls a lever up and down to release the car once it arrives at the requested floor. According to a non-exhaustive survey conducted by The New York Times in 2017, there are only 53 of these around the city — though the real number is likely higher.

When he’s not operating the elevator, Brown spends much of his time behind the desk, looking at the recently-installed security cameras outside the building, scanning every corner of the building, and even the close subway station one block away, which allows him to know in advance when tenants are coming.

Brown moves confidently around the lobby, but the truth is that he is quite new to the job. He was hired in December 2019, after he was introduced to the building superintendent by an acquaintance. Looking back, Brown feels lucky to have landed the position right before the pandemic hit and jobs were upended for so many in New York City.

“Before this, I was working at a vegan restaurant. If I didn’t decide to take the doorman position, I would have probably been out of a job,” he said, referring to the in-person restaurant shutdown that came in March 2020.

As with every new job, not everything came naturally to Brown at the start. He had to memorize the residents' names and faces, build a relationship with them and, of course, understand how the manual elevator worked. During the first month on the job, he said the co-op board that runs the building complained about him, saying he was not “opening the door fast enough.” After that episode, he made sure to be faster and more responsive, and he has not received a complaint since.

Brown is used to his position now, and says it’s “quite easy.”

“It’s not hectic at all. It can be enjoyable at times,” Brown said. “You step outside and you watch people walk by and you see all these different personalities and you create all these stories in your head based on what you see.” But when asked what the favorite part of his job is, after taking a few seconds to answer, he smiled and admitted: it’s the food.

“I like eating on shift. That's a privilege. This is something special to me,” Brown revealed. “I would usually bring snacks from home or even at random times during the night shift I have food delivered to me through UberEats, just for comfort,” he said describing these lonely and treasured moments behind his desk.

Not every part of his shift is as pleasant. Ever since the pandemic started, like in almost every workplace, new safety measures have been put in place, and now Brown and his colleagues have to clean doorknobs, desks, and elevator buttons, and common areas every hour, and keep track of their cleanings in a log. If it’s a busy day, more often.

It can be tedious. All employees and outside visitors of the building need to complete a clearance form at the beginning of every shift that states that they have not been knowingly in contact with anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19. After they sign the form, Brown sanitizes the used pens.

“I never never do it in front of them, because I think they’ll find it offensive. I wait ‘til they leave,” he said, laughing.

Like many New Yorkers, when the pandemic first hit, a good percentage of the residents at 271 Central Park West, some of whom are wealthy lawyers — “multimillionaires” Brown adds — sought refuge in their second houses, mostly upstate. The building has a history of rich and famous residents, including Bruce Willis, who owned a two-floor apartment, and listed it for more than $17 million three years ago. Before him, Meryl Streep and Robin Williams lived there, but now, according to Brown, there are no celebrities living in the building.

Brown recalled that since the pandemic hit, residents have reacted differently when they come home. While some, missing social contact, became more chatty — “sometimes they just get very repetitive and you have to, you know, play the game,” he explains — others are scared of catching COVID-19.

“There was this family, they've been away for like an entire year. And when they came back from their suburban home, they were super scared,” Brown said. “They wanted to walk all the way away from me. And they decided to take the stairs instead of going on the elevator because they didn’t want to be inside the elevator with me. They lived on the sixth floor.”

Even though residents escaped for the suburbs, doormen have been considered essential workers throughout the pandemic and haven’t had much time to rest as they dealt with a whole new set of tasks. If dry cleaning deliveries declined, Amazon and food deliveries have spiked. A trend confirmed by data showing that Amazon increased its earnings by 70% during 2020, while the online food delivery’s sector of the restaurant market is growing at a faster rate than the initial projections — only last year it increased of 13% instead of 9% and by 2025 it’s expected to rise as much as 21%.

Brown says that he now knows most of the delivery workers by name because he sees them almost daily.

Despite the pandemic, Brown is happy to say that he now has a good relationship with all of the residents, thanks to his refined ability to sense whether someone is in the mood to talk. The fact that he sometimes surprises the tenants with a cake also helped residents come around.

“The president of the [co-op] board lives on the seventh floor. And once, on my day off, I surprised her with a south black cake with rum. She was like ‘Oh my God, thank you so much.’ It was unexpected. She was really impressed by the packaging and box too,” Brown remembered, laughing.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that the co-op board president loved the cake; Brown is a professional. When he’s not a doorman, he is a vegan and gluten-free baker. Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, he grew up watching his parents cook and bake, learning and experimenting with them, most often traditional Jamaican delicacies like pineapple upside-down cake and rum-soaked black cake. Once he got older, he decided to take it more seriously.

”I told myself ‘This is what I want to do. Something that I really want to pursue,’” Brown said.

When he turned 18, his whole family, including his four siblings, moved to New York and have been here ever since. Brown first worked at vegan and gluten-free restaurants, and in 2017, he opened his business, baking sweets from home and, later, using a commercial kitchen in New Jersey. “The thing I love the most about it is that I have the opportunity to share.”

Brown has built his vegan bakery clientele through social media entirely on his own. The Instagram profile for The Baking Room — framed in pastel colors — is populated by professional pictures of creamy muffins, chocolate cookies and frosted cakes that invite the viewer to immediately buy a sweet treat. And, based on the enthusiastic comments under every picture, it seems that the taste lives up to the hype.

Brown’s specialties pull from both from American and Jamaican traditions. Among chocolate chip cookies and blueberry muffins there is also the popular black cake, made of dried fruits soaked in white rum and brandy for at least a whole year. The dried fruits are then added to the cake mixture, which is then covered in black molasses — where it gets its name. “The longer it sits, the better it will be,” explains Brown.

Brown, who lives with his mother and his two sisters, starts his day early in the morning, “When I wake up, everyone in the house is still sleeping,” he says, but these are the hours when he can bake for the day’s deliveries. He finishes what he can around midnight, when he returns home from his shifts as a doorman.

Whenever he is not working his two jobs, Brown is often busy with modeling gigs, a career launched in January 2020.

“People around me started telling me ‘you should model’ and I was like ‘I don’t model,’” he recalls. “But then I thought that this will be more exposure for me and for my business. So I decided to take advantage of it.”

So Brown is now working with a modeling agency based in Connecticut, which takes care of his photo shoots and aims to build his portfolio.

Jennifer Manchester-Reid, who first met Brown when she became a fan of the bakery and who is now his friend, is amazed by how he manages to juggle between three jobs. “He definitely keeps himself busy, and seems as if he is an overachiever. And, as busy as he is, he always makes time for working out and taking care of his health,” she said.

Right now, Brown remains grateful for his position as a doorman, and is content having two extra jobs on the backburner because they add to his financial stability. Despite it not being “a good paying job” and receiving tips only at the end of the year in Christmas envelopes, the doorman job comes with benefits, because the union he’s part of, 32BJ, provides him with sick leave, vacation time and good health insurance.

The union leader recently got vaccinated and is inviting his members to follow his example. His appeal has been echoed by the Real Estate Board of New York and Attorney Leni Morrisons Cummins, who represents several cooperative boards and has begun drafting policies that they could adopt to mandate the vaccine to their employees. Policies that, she assures, would protect those “who do not choose to get vaccines due to medical conditions or religious beliefs.” Brown, however, is hesitant.

“They did talk about it recently, a few weeks ago, but they didn’t tell us if it’s mandatory that we get it. I, myself, am very concerned about taking the vaccine. And I just think it's way too soon. Like, a vaccine usually takes a few years to develop. And I find it very suspicious that, you know, this came out so quickly,” Brown said. “I'm just waiting it out for a while until I do take the vaccine. Some people have experienced bad side effects.”

When looking at his future Howard Brown has a clear idea: he wants to be a baker. And when asked if he is proud of what he achieved, he looks away for a second.

“I’m just a guy building his business and constantly working,” Brown said.