The doorbell was a button on the wall outside the building. You pushed the button and somewhere inside the apartment a bell rang and the person inside knew somebody was at the door. The doorbell did not tell you who was at the door. The doorbell told you somebody was there. You went to the door and you looked through the peephole or you opened the door and you found out who it was. The doorbell was an announcement without identification.

Every doorbell had a different sound. Some buzzed. Some rang. Some clicked. The sound was not designed. The sound was the result of the mechanism wearing down. A new doorbell buzzed clean. An old doorbell buzzed with a rattle. You could tell how old the building was by how the doorbell sounded. The doorbell was an acoustic history of the building.

The buzzer on my building on East Seventh Street did not work for two years. You had to yell from the street. You stood on the sidewalk and you yelled the name of the person you wanted and somebody in the building opened the window and looked down and either they buzzed you in with the broken buzzer that somehow still opened the door or they threw the key down in a sock. The sock was the delivery system. The key was the payload. The sidewalk was the landing zone.

The doorbell is a camera now. The camera sees you and sends your picture to a phone and the person inside decides from a screen whether to let you in. Nobody yells from the sidewalk. Nobody throws a key in a sock. Nobody opens the door without knowing who is behind it. The doorbell used to say somebody is here. Now the doorbell says somebody is here and here is their face and here is the time and the footage is saved. The doorbell became a witness. The old doorbell was just a question. Somebody is here. Do you want to answer?

See also: Skeleton Key, Tenement Window