The Analog Charms of New York’s Intercoms

When a visitor presses a button on an analog New York City apartment intercom, they enter a time portal to somewhere in the last century when the wiring was likely installed.

If they’re lucky, someone upstairs will hear it: a metallic, almost offensive clang that sets the dog barking and sends cortisol spiking. Then comes the electric sigh of the lock releasing, and they’re let inside.

Its abrasive, loud buzz is the sound of takeout arriving, dates buzzing up for the first sleepover and delivery drivers pressing a button and walking away without waiting for an answer.

Malcolm Arnold’s 2,000-square-foot business, Apple Core Electronics, on Flushing Avenue in Bushwick makes exterior intercom panels, sets their wiring, punches buttons and engraves addresses.

Using precise measurements and instructions from intercom specialists and building owners, Apple Core’s workers monitor industrial machines that cut steel and punch holes for everything from small multifamily buildings to 200-unit high-rises.

One of Apple Core’s regular clients is Intercom Techs, a small business focused on repairing and replacing analog systems, owned by husband-and-wife team Suleyka Henriquez, 35, and Stalyn Henriquez, 46.

“NYC is full of old stuff, and I’m the one who is fixing it,” said Mr. Henriquez. The couple has 80 clients and makes eight to 12 emergency service calls daily around the city.

One morning in April, Mr. Henriquez and a technician, Luis Concepcion, 58, started their day with the sound of a screwdriver at the end of a drill to pry open the panel inside a Hell’s Kitchen walk-up. The men opened the panel to find a quagmire of colorful wires in a cutout in the wall.

Michael Weiss, a resident of the building, noticed his intercom was broken when his takeout never arrived one night last winter. He filed a repair ticket with the building and one month later, Edward Jiménez, a technician with Intercom Techs, swapped out the in-unit station. After repairing the bell, Mr. Jiménez found no outside sound reached the apartment’s phone speaker, so the company scheduled a return visit to Mr. Weiss’s apartment in April to investigate.

If 4B has communication and 5B doesn’t, maybe it’s 5B’s unit. If both floors are off, maybe the system itself is the issue. Like ‘West Side Story’ characters who talk to one another on fire escapes, the intercom repairmen communicate from different floors as they diagnose why New Yorkers’ buzzers are broken and clarify what was once garbled. In today’s case, the two found the speaker and microphone busted. They ordered a new one from El Vox, an Italian manufacturer, and will return to install it once the part arrives.

Analog charm persists around the city.

On the Upper East Side, Ethan De La Rosa-Kerr figured out the “door” button on his intercom wasn’t working when he was moving in this past January. On his visit, it took Mr. Jiménez about half an hour to fix the door release and replace Mr. De La Rosa-Kerr’s in-unit intercom. ​​The building also requested a new lobby panel to accommodate tenants with new addresses after combining units, and to replace their old brass panel with its missing buttons, handwritten notes and worn-off engravings.

One family on the Lower East Side has been using the same intercom for almost the last half-century, and they’re ready for a change.

Annette Caraballo, 57, a stay-at-home mom of three, moved into Village East, a three-building, 434-unit Mitchell-Lama co-op complex, in 1977 when she was 8 years old. Back then, the lobby intercom at the East Village complex had a phone receiver; visitors dialed a code to buzz a resident’s landline — if the line was busy, they got a busy signal.

In 1980, the classic stainless-steel panel in the lobby connected to an in-unit buzzer was installed and remains there today. Until the early 2000s, the building had closed-circuit television, piping a live lobby feed onto a private cable channel. Residents could flip on the TV to see who was downstairs before buzzing them in.

Growing up, Ms. Caraballo’s mother would watch the lobby feed on TV as she waited for her father to come home from his work as a corrections officer at Rikers Island. In the late 80s, in her clubbing days when she’d stay out until 4 a.m. dancing at The Underground in Union Square, Ms. Caraballo’s father would stay up to watch the feed until she got safely in the front door.

Ms. Caraballo misses being able to see who’s at the door on video. She said her current intercom “works whenever it wants to” and makes a clicking sound instead of a buzzing sound.

According to Village East co-op board vice president, Rachel, 57, a bookkeeper who asked to be identified by first name only, many building residents want a video intercom to prevent package theft and increase security. The older systems like Village’s East’s can be challenging to repair and maintain — the manufacturer of its intercom, Hemco Inc., is no longer in business and the technician who used to repair it by hand has retired. But newer systems, often with a monthly fee, are still more expensive.

Village East’s co-op board was quoted $500,000 for a video system upgrade and will form an intercom committee that will decide what’s doable.

Mr. Concepcion, a technician from Intercom Techs, lives in a building in the Bronx, where he can buzz people in through his phone. He believes that eventually, most buildings will update to a virtual system. Until then, he is the bridge between analog and digital.

Once the new lobby panel for Mr. De La Rosa-Kerr’s Upper East Side building arrived, Mr. Concepcion was back there, using his drill to open the panel and expose hundreds of vein-like wires. He held the old and new panels side-by-side to check that each old button matched up with the new one. For the next eight hours, he stood in that lobby, unbraiding and re-braiding wires with surgical precision until the new panel was installed. Later that night, tenants arrived home none the wiser of the time and skill it took to untangle the cables their voices would soon travel through.