The long goodbye

“I knew English words, but I couldn’t have a conversation,” recalled the Connemara native. “It didn’t take too long to learn to say ‘Good morning.’ “
And his position as a doorman at the 379-unit Upper East Side building, known as Imperial House, did pay the rent — for 44 years.
Yesterday morning, long before his 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift began, he donned his uniform for the last time.
New York City doormen like to be ready for work before the official starting time. And for more that 40 years, Curran left the same Bronx apartment building, near the Armory on Kingbridge Road, at 4:15 a.m.
More recently he’d been leaving an hour earlier as the No. 4 train has been less reliable during renovations, but also because he wanted to help out a young colleague who’s a student.
His job at 150 East 69th St. helped raise and educate his own son and daughter, who are now both married and living in Westchester. Curran and his wife have five grandchildren, one of whom, he said with some pride, is a Gaelic footballer.
The quiet tree-lined block, dominated by the 28-story Imperial House, hasn’t changed much since Eisenhower’s last year in the White House. However, the old carriage house across the street, which had long been abandoned for its original purpose, has been converted into luxury apartments, as has the old firehouse on the corner.
Imperial House itself has not altered visually, although revolving doors were installed in about 1963, making winters a little easier for the doormen. It still has Japanese gardens, the drive-in, and the four stout pillars that might provide cover for unwanted visitors while the staff are preoccupied.
“You have to be alive and alert,” he said. “You have to watch everything that moves.”
Curran set out 44 years ago from the Irish-speaking parish of Furbo, near Spiddal, Co. Galway, with his brother John. “He wouldn’t go without me, and I wouldn’t go without him,” Curran recalled.
At Shannon airport, his father pressed a half-crown (two and a half shillings) into his hand, saying: “I wish you the best of luck. Do good wherever you go.”
He believes that he still has the half-crown somewhere. And the heavy tweed suit he traveled in hangs in the wardrobe, barely used. “I’ll be buried in it,” he said.
Not long after arriving at Idlewild airport, Curran encountered a doorman in Queens. “I asked him, ‘How do I get a job like that?’ ” he said.
He directed the young immigrant to a new building on 69th Street in Manhattan, where the manager was looking for staff.
“He was a nice guy,” he said of his boss, an Englishman who didn’t remember names easily. “He called me ‘Irish,’ ” Curran remembered.
He told him to mop up in the basement. Curran recalled he didn’t understand the word “pail.”
A couple of hours later, a regular doorman arrived drunk. When the manager told Curran to get a uniform, he hesitated momentarily. “You’ll learn it, Irish,” his boss said.
“And I did learn it and got to like it,” he said.
His Sunday partner for 12 years, Diego Palaez, who grew up in Medellin, Colombia, described Curran as a “gentleman and a scholar.”
“He’s been a delight to work with,” Palaez said. “I’ve really benefited from his experience. And what a sense of humor!
“And he’s very dedicated. He’s never been late.” Not once in 44 years. Not even that time in the mid-1960s, when snow made the elevated train unusable. Somehow, beginning a circuitous route on the D train, he got in on time.
By that stage, he’d met and married his wife, Kathleen. “She’s one of the greatest women ever to come out of Kerry,” he said.
When Matthew Jr. was born, in 1965, they vacationed in Connemara to show him off.
His son, now a high-school teacher, spent five summers working as a doorman in Imperial House.
“It was interesting to see how much he loved his job and how much he cared for the tenants,” Matthew Curran Jr. said of his father.
The younger Curran recalled that his high school friends were intimidated by his father’s passive demeanor. “Although we knew he was a teddy bear,” he said.
“But at work he had a different persona. He was so much more animated there,” he said.
He remembered how good it felt when he discovered all those people, some of them famous, loved his father. “Howard Cossell used to call me Junior. He had a cigar as long as your arm,” he remembered.
The famous commentator liked to shadowbox. Whereas Curran Sr. played along with his antics, shadowboxing him in return, his son shied away. Cossell told him, “You’re not as tough as your old man.”
The building has always been associated with people from the entertainment industry.
“Joan Crawford was one of the finest ladies there ever was, regardless of what was written about her by her daughter,” Curran Sr. said.
Irene Dunne, his favorite Hollywood actress, also lived there.
Curran remains charitable toward the superstars the doormen regarded as difficult. “Lucille Ball: Let’s say she was OK,” he said.
When his union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, which organizes the 26,000 workers who service the city’s residential buildings, celebrated Curran’s 40th anniversary in 2000, its newsletter said that he was a “model of discretion.”
Another resident, Ann Greenberg, wife of real estate developer Jay Greenberg, valued his friendship as she battled cancer and would come down to chat with him every Sunday
“She was a beautiful woman,” he said.
Greenberg would speak to him about cancer, illness, and dying.
When she took her own life by jumping from her apartment, it was Curran who went up to the balcony onto which she fell to identify her. “I broke down,” he said. “It took a lot out of me.”
Curran said he’s never wanted to take a day off and has never left work angry,
“You’re on your feet for nine hours,” he said. “I never took a lunch; didn’t need it. Never allowed myself to get fat.”
The letters went out recently to residents announcing that their long-serving doorman was retiring. On Thursday, on the last day of his last full week, Curran worked the door with Suco Dervisevic, a Croatian from the former Yugoslavia. “We’ll miss him,” Dervisevic said.
Many of the tenants, weren’t ready for a final goodbye. “I’ll see you before Tuesday, Matthew,” more than one resident said.
“I can’t even deal with it now,” said one middle-aged woman. “The building will fall down.”
He held the door for a 95-year-old resident, walking out with her nurse’s aide, who said simply, as she had done for 44 years, “Thank you, Matthew.”
By Sunday, the news had sunk in.
“How can you do this to me, Matthew?” one elderly resident said.
“He’s been the mainstay,” said Harriet Squiare, whose parents were original tenants and who moved into the building herself in 1985. “It will never be the same without him.”
Curran agreed that no one will again spend 44 years on their feet outside 150 East 69th St., whatever about anywhere else.
“But God was good, and he allowed me to do it,” he said.
Kathleen Curran, who worked for many years for the Ursuline nuns, has retired too, at least officially.
“They wouldn’t let her go; she still goes in one day a week,” he said.
They may visit his brother and sister in Ireland. He hasn’t been there since his father passed away a decade ago. (His brother John, who retired after an accident, still lives in New York. Another brother, Dermot, with whom he speaks Irish, lives in Chicago.)
And now he can go to Gaelic Park on Sundays and pursue other interests. “I’ve always been pretty handy with carpentry,” he said.
But one thing is top of the list.
His wife told him that the kids play Gaelic football in sneakers. He intends to get his grandson, who’s 10, a pair of proper boots and teach him how to kick a point.