The Truth About NYC Doormen
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The white-glove building at 485 Park Avenue is home to nearly two dozen of the city’s ritziest residents. And on an overcast Thursday in February, it was also home to a talk show in its lobby.
“Now is the moment we've all been waiting for. You have a party trick that we're excited to see,” Sara Leeds, the 30-year-old host, told her guest. On this talk show, the interviewee was Senad, a lanky, middle-aged Balkins émigré who flexed his karate skills for viewers. He also happens to be a doorman in the pre-war co-op building.
Since 2023, Leeds has traversed Manhattan hunting for stories like Senad’s as part of Doorman Stories, her social media account dedicated to Gotham’s gatekeepers. Instead of interviewing strangers on the street, Leeds finds the city’s most intriguing doormen and asks them to open up about themselves and their buildings.
Others have taken an interest in doormen, too. In 2017, photographer Alina Gozin’a showcased her portraits of New York City doormen at an Australian art gallery. More recently, author Stephen Bruno penned a memoir, Building Material, about his 14-year career as a Park Avenue doorman. In May, bestselling author Chris Pavone’s latest novel, The Doorman, will be released.
While Leeds blindly approached lobbies during her account’s infancy, doormen and their friends now regularly reach out to proffer tales. Leeds, who works in marketing, says she started Doorman Stories after a short-lived stint hosting a show for a fashion brand’s TikTok. When that company abruptly shut down, she realized she wanted to be the director-producer of future projects instead of just hired talent. “I had this kind of laundry list of ideas for a show that I wanted to do, but I didn't really know how to stand it up on my own,” she says.
Over coffee, she met with a friend of a friend, Joe Fowler, who had experience making social media videos. Many of her ideas centered around New York City culture, but Fowler told Leeds he preferred her doorman concept.
Today, Doorman Stories lives across TikTok and Instagram, where Leeds slices 15-minute interviews into digestible clips and has amassed just under 200,000 followers across platforms. Her guests have shared stories about an A-lister’s affair with a doorman, unwittingly manning the lobby of James Spader, and generous Christmas tips.
For many Manhattanites, these patrolmen for the point-one percent are part security, part confidante. But doormen use their discretion when chatting with Leeds, cautious of violating tony buildings' omertà. Barely any doorman discloses residents’ names and some conduct the interviews away from their buildings. Their participation rates vary across the city. “Park Avenue is usually the hardest,” she says.
Leeds, who was raised in a New York suburb, says she recognized doormen’s outsized role in city living after visiting her grandmother on the Upper East Side as a child. Although the union members are longstanding symbols of New York in their elegant garb, doormen can also feel invisible. “I think they are a fixture of many New Yorkers' lives, but we don't think about them that way as readily,” she says.
Franco Petito, a doorman featured on the account, says he appreciates the recognition Leeds’ account has given the centuries-old profession. “We're like the windows of the world,” he says. “It's a job like everyone else, but it's a meaningful job.”
Laura Meehan-Agasian, a New York City realtor, says she follows the account because she constantly interacts with doormen and enjoys hearing their stories. “I know all the people who get up early,” she says. “I hang with those people more than corporate America.”
But many Doorman Stories devotees live outside the densely populated island. Despite the upper crust fleeing to locales like Palm Beach, New York City remains a source of intrigue across the world. “Everyone wants a piece of it and they want to hear genuine stories,” Meehan-Agasian says. “She captures that.”
While Doorman Stories isn’t The Tonight Show, the account is a window into the future of video. Increasingly, social media accounts produce episodic content similar to the cadence of popular network shows. Other noted accounts include Boy Room, where the host tours men's messy apartments and offers decor ideas, and SubwayTakes, where everyday New Yorkers and the occasional celebrity share hot takes while riding an MTA train.
Leeds, who has made money through sponsored videos, believes her account can translate to other cities home to doormen. She’d also like to penetrate the apartments her guests guard, producing a coffee table book for living rooms. “I just think there are a bunch of definitions of ‘doorman,’ who can have a lot of fascinating stories in New York and beyond,” she says.
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