16 THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020
Sanabria celebrating his fiftieth birthday, in August, 2017.
POSTSCRIPT
JUAN SANABRIA
The life and death of one of New York City’s first coronavirus victims.BYJONATHAN BLITZER
COURTESY WALKIRIS CRUZ-PEREZ
A
t 860 Grand Concourse, a resi-
dential apartment building in the
Bronx, the doorman’s post is just in-
side the front door, on a landing be-
tween two flights of stairs. One of them
leads up to the offices of a dentist and
a lawyer, who, along with several phy-
sicians, rent commercial space. The
other goes down past two pairs of gold-
painted columns and into the main
lobby, where an elevator services seven
floors with a hundred and eleven apart-
ments. Tuesday through Saturday, be-
tween eight in the morning and five in
the evening, tenants going down to or
coming up from the lobby could ex-
pect a greeting from a trim, punctili-
ous man with close-cropped hair. He
wore a navy-blue uniform that hung
loosely off his narrow shoulders. His
name was Juan Sanabria.
There was an art to Sanabria’s sal-
utations. Dana Frishkorn, who’s lived
in the building for three and a half
years, appreciated that he called her by
her first name when she entered, and
never failed to tell her “Take care” when
she left. Yet somehow Sanabria knew
that Anthony Tucker, who has spent
five years in the building, preferred to
be called by his last name. “Hey, Tuck,”
Sanabria would say, extending his hand
for a fist bump. When Tony Chen, who
runs a boutique tour company and liveson the seventh floor, limped into the
building one morning, addled by plan-
tar fasciitis, Sanabria showed him a
foot stretch that helped. On another
day, when a tenant showed up at the
front door with a large couch to take
up to his apartment, even though the
building’s rules mandated the use of a
side door, Sanabria stood watch to make
sure a meddlesome neighbor didn’t
wander over.
“With Juan, you always got the sense
that he was more knowledgeable than
he let on,” Georgeen Comerford, who
has lived in the building for nearly fifty
years, told me. A photography profes-
sor at CUNY, she described Sanabria as
a “mensch who appreciated the ironies.”
He would call her mámi, and wink,
when she passed through the lobby. It
wasn’t just that you were glad to see
him, she said. “If you didn’t see him,
you wanted to know where he was.
When he wasn’t around, you felt it.”
Uncharacteristically, Sanabria wasn’t
around the last week of February.
His eighty-two-year-old mother, with
whom he shared an apartment on
Ogden Avenue, was suffering from em-
physema; he had taken her to a nearby
hospital. When word spread in the
building that Sanabria’s mother was ill,
no one was surprised to learn that he
was by her side. “It was who he was,”
Jimmy Montalvo, one of the other door-
men, told me. Montalvo and Sanabria
were neighbors—Montalvo got his job
at the building through Sanabria, three
years ago—and frequently had break-
fast together at their corner bodega;
Sanabria was always bringing food back
for his mother, Montalvo said. “He
took good care of her.” Even when
Sanabria was away from 860 Grand
Concourse, during a break or on his
days off, he gave the impression that
he was never far. James Tirado, the
youngest and newest doorman on staff,
used to get calls and texts from Sanabria,
checking up on him. “How’s the day
going?” Sanabria would ask. “Is every-
thing going O.K. for you?”
By the time his mother’s health had
improved, and Sanabria returned to
work, on March 3rd, he was beginning
to feel ill himself. There were still very
few publicly known COVID-19 cases in
New York City, and his symptoms—
dizziness and fatigue—were not yet