Where Have You Gone, Ned Wertimer?

Poor doormen. First, there may be labor strife. Now, no one seems to want them anymore:

“The biggest utility of having a doorman is that there’s someone to accept the packages,” said Andrew Rosenblatt, 33, a bankruptcy lawyer at Chadbourne & Park. Several years ago, he and his wife, Courtney, left a full-service theater district high-rise for a nondoorman co-op on the Upper West Side, with a live-in superintendent to handle most deliveries.

He much preferred the new arrangement. “We just felt like they really didn’t do anything for us,” Mr. Rosenblatt said of the doormen. “If anything, you sort of feel obligated to engage in idle chitchat. And the whole tipping thing presents another moment of tension. Our doormen weren’t too helpful, but if you were carrying a bag you wanted to take yourself, and they’d come and take it, did you tip them?”

Holiday tipping is an exacerbated exercise in misery for those already ambivalent about their doorman. And for others, the need to make conversation is so annoying that it alone is enough to drive them into nondoormen buildings.

“I had one young guy who moved from a fancy condo doorman building in California where he had a very cheery doorman,” said Hy Rosen, a senior vice president at Bellmarc Realty. “He wanted a building without a doorman, and his biggest reason seemed to be he didn’t want to have to say hello to someone twice a day.”

Michele Golden, another broker for Bellmarc, lived in two luxury buildings before buying a Chelsea loft that came with just a full-time superintendent. She doesn’t miss the constant socializing, which she found cloying. “It’s like a really good restaurant — the lower key the service, the more I like it,” she said. “When they’re fawning all over me, I’m not enjoying that. I don’t want service to be intrusive in my life.”

(Who the fuck is Ned Wertimer — besides a famous Fiji, that is — and where do I remember him from?)