When Park Avenue doorman Stephen Bruno was sorting through the building's mail and found an envelope with sexually suggestive drawings on it, he and his co-workers wondered who it was addressed to. I knew right away that it was.
“I don't need to see the name, because I know who it is,” he told the Post of another resident who also had a habit of eating suggestive pawpaw fruit in the lobby.
In his new book, Building Materials: The Memoir of a Park Avenue Doorman, Bruno describes his 20 years working for New York's One Percenters and the intimate glimpses he gained into their lives. It describes in detail.
“They are often stressed and estranged. They are in different places,” Bruno told the Post. “They say hello, they're polite, but you can tell there's something weighing them down, and it's often business. A lot of them are in the financial industry.”
Bruno, who grew up in the Bronx, was 22 when he was hired as a summer relief doorman for a building on Park Avenue. Now 42, he still works as a doorman on the Upper East Side, where he has spent the past 14 years in the same building.
During his first night shift at the Tony Co-op, he was reading the newspaper when he heard the elevator “ping” and saw a tall man in a long bathrobe come out.
Her bathrobe came undone, revealing her “very orange” inner thighs. The man then begins to awkwardly stretch in front of Bruno, commenting that if he had known how handsome the doorman was, he would have come downstairs sooner.
“He liked what he liked, so he thought you might want to play with him,” Bruno said. “He was a strange man.”
Over the years, he has become familiar with the romantic tendencies of various residents, from hot dates to late-night rendezvous.
He knew when the two residents would become involved with each other, as he saw them riding the elevator between floors early on the night shift.
Another resident had a girlfriend. He would come during the day and entertain gentlemen at night.
“Everyone would come over at 2 or 3 in the morning. He would call downstairs and say, 'So-and-so is coming for the nightcap,' and he always had to say his name because it was always a different name. '' Bruno recalled.
And there was a woman who was always worried about ghosts.
“Her apartment has very little furniture, just one candle in the middle of the living room,” Bruno said. “She would often call me to say she saw a ghost. One time, she crossed the street, turned around, and stared at the building for about 30 minutes.”
Some residents revealed themselves to be stingy and downright mean.
During the holidays, I was sometimes given just a candy bar by someone who regularly asked for extra help.
And then there was the woman who hated him from the beginning and never forgave him for replacing the doorman she loved.
“That woman was crossing boundaries on a daily basis,” Bruno said. “One time, another doorman was mopping the floor and she came and walked through the area he was mopping, even though there was space on both sides. It was clearly rude. So we looked at her in surprise and said, “Oh, I'm sorry.'' I just want everyone to try harder. ”
However, despite the occasional unpleasant and sordid occurrences in this territory, the good relations and pleasant encounters with the inhabitants far outweigh the bad ones.
When he was writing in graduate school at Hunter College, the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Bloom, who lived in his building, were very supportive.
“It was my first year in the MFA program and I was very disappointed, and Mrs. Bloom noticed that,” Bruno recalled.
They invite him to dinner and decide to watch a documentary about playwright August Wilson. Mr. Wilson also comes from a working-class background and has worked his way up through the ranks.
“This work showed me that I can be a brown, Latino man from the Bronx and still be an artist,” Bruno said. “They basically saved my life. I'm grateful to them.”
Unfortunately, Mr. Bloom has passed away, but Mr. Bruno still keeps in touch with Mrs. Bloom, who still lives in San Francisco.
She couldn't make it to his book party last week, but her son came in her place. Bruno plans to visit her in December and present her with a signed copy of his memoirs.
“As the book got closer to publication, she was very proud of me,” Bruno said. Bruno is currently researching a novel set in New York in the 1950s. “She was overjoyed the day the book was published.”
