Today we’ll look at a TikTok video creator who has interviewed more than 100 doormen. We’ll also get details on why Mayor Eric Adams is demanding that federal agents stop making arrests at immigration courts in New York City.
Sara Leeds doesn’t always get the interview she wants. There was the time she went to a building on the Upper East Side, trailed by her videographer, and asked the doorman if he wanted to appear on camera. The answer was no. The building has its rules. “I’m walking away,” Leeds said, “and the doorman calls back to me. He’s like, ‘Wait, wait, come back.’ So I walk over, and he goes: ‘My superintendent can see you on the security camera. And he wanted to say, Thank you so much for what you’re doing.’” What she does, when the supers or the co-op board bosses don’t say no, is interview doormen on TikTok. She has posted hundreds of videos in the last couple of years — fast-moving conversations with the protectors and problem-solvers of daily life for people in thousands of buildings. She has 5.8 million likes on TikTok and 200,000 followers across different platforms. Doormen are “quintessentially New York,” as the sociologist Peter Bearman observed in a 2005 book: “a critical element” of some New Yorkers’ “sense of self and place.” Leeds says that doormen are gatekeepers to the outside world and confidants to the inner world of the buildings where they work — as well as quartermasters. “The Amazon Primes of the world have made the job physically taxing,” Leeds said. The union that doormen belong to, Local 32BJ SEIU, says there are 27,000 doorpeople — Leeds has talked with three women among the 100 interviews she has done. The union says doormen work in more than 3,500 buildings and are paid around $28 an hour. They themselves often live in neighborhoods far from the buildings they watch over. Leeds said she had not interviewed the doormen in buildings she or her relatives have lived in. Her first exposure to one was when she was young — “a man named Sal who worked in the N.Y.U. faculty housing I was born in,” said Leeds, whose father taught in the psychology department at New York University at the time. Sal “taught my mom to say, ‘Te quiero mucho y tú también lo sabes,’ which she still says to me.” It means “I love you so much and you know it, too.” She hit upon making videos about doormen when she and a friend were casting about for a project. Leeds had worked at a social media agency and saw the potential of TikTok. “So I thought, OK, what can I start from the ground up and run myself?” she recalled. “There were a lot of dating shows,” but that format didn’t captivate her, she said. “And there were a lot of fashion shows, which I love, but I wanted something a little more agnostic. I felt fashion leaned very female, which is awesome, but I wanted something kind of human-interest.” She had written out several possibilities. “Near the bottom of the list was ‘talking to doormen,’” she said, “and we were like, Let’s hit the street next week and walk into buildings and see what happens.” Off they went. “We got a lot of noes, a lot of rejection,” she said. “And then one person said yes.” And another, and another. Now she has an inbox of requests from doormen who want to be interviewed. Taping them all would take a year, she said. Nothing in Leeds’s videos has been as dicey — or as disturbing, if you live in a doorman building — as the events described in the new Chris Pavone novel “The Doorman.” One doorman told Leeds about the time he assumed a man trailing a tenant into the building was an acquaintance. Later, that man left with a suitcase. “Little did I know that the ‘friend’ robbed him, tied him up, took the jewelry, left with the luggage,” the doorman said. “How am I supposed to know this?” People in co-ops or condos who aspire to live in even pricier places may not realize it, but there is upward mobility for doormen, too. One doorman told Leeds that he probably should have moved on from a prewar building on the Upper East Side, to one on Central Park South or “maybe on Fifth Avenue.” “We have the 1 percent” in the building he has worked for 20 years, “but there’s the 1 percent of the 1 percent. The people here are great, but there’s a step up.” WEATHER Expect showers with a possibility of thunderstorms in the afternoon and temperatures in the mid-70s. Tonight will be cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms and a low around 66. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Sept. 1 (Labor Day). The latest New York news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Adams wants courthouse detention of migrants to stop
Breaking with President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, Mayor Eric Adams demanded that the federal government stop making arrests at immigration courts in New York City. Adams, who is running for a second term as an independent after skipping the Democratic primary, is distancing himself from a president he grew close to when he was under federal indictment on corruption charges. The Trump administration dropped the case against Adams in April, saying the prosecution was preventing the mayor from helping with Trump’s agenda on deportations. Adams said on Tuesday that the city had filed a brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the administration’s authority to detain people who show up for mandatory immigration hearings. The brief claims that city officials “cannot effectively govern” if many residents are too frightened to appear for routine legal proceedings. The detention practice, the city argued, threatens to “deter people from accessing the court system on which local governance depends.” The mayor’s statement on Tuesday was another sign that his alliance with the administration is under strain. Last month, after an off-duty customs officer was shot, the Justice Department sued Adams in his capacity as mayor, claiming that the city’s sanctuary policies were undermining federal actions. Adams has repeatedly expressed frustration with regulations that limit cooperation with the federal immigration authorities and had pushed to give agents from U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement a presence on Rikers Island, home to the city’s largest jail complex. ICE had been effectively banned from Rikers for more than a decade. But on Tuesday, the city’s top lawyer, Muriel Goode-Trufant, wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi, defending the city’s sanctuary city policies and saying that states and cities “need not participate” in federal immigration enforcement. METROPOLITAN DIARY Sidewalk stomp
Dear Diary: It was a hot July day, and I was walking up Lincoln Place in Park Slope toward Prospect Park to enjoy some shade. A man and a woman in front of me were hurrying in the same direction. She was wearing an ivory jumpsuit with a flowing chiffon scarf and high-heeled sandals. He was in beige linen pants and a white shirt. Perhaps they were late to their own wedding? I imagined their guests waiting for them at the Picnic House. In any case, the heat wasn’t slowing them down. Following behind, much more slowly and in sneakers, I admired how the woman could walk with such speed in her heels. Suddenly she stopped. A blister? A turned ankle? No. She darted to her right and stomped on the sidewalk before quickly resuming her pace. As I passed the spot, I looked down at the sidewalk to see a squashed lanternfly. One is never too late, or too well dressed, to do a small good deed. — Dorothy Barnhouse Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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