By Lisa Robinson

NEW YORK, Mar 13 (Reuters) - As more workplaces go smoke-free, many smokers have laid claim to doorways as a place to light up and shoot the breeze, but company policies, building rules and even local ordinances are forcing them to retreat farther away.

The outdoor cigarette klatch, a ubiquitous sight in many cities, has become increasingly unwelcome, particularly at building entrances. People going in and out complain about the smoke--annoying to some and downright dangerous to those suffering from asthma, emphysema and other health problems.

Delivery people do not like maneuvering through crowds that gather during lunch hours and at break times. Custodians resent having to pick up cigarette butts. And some businesses, particularly health-care providers, just do not think it looks good for staffers to puff away in front of their buildings.

As a result, companies and institutions are cracking down on smokers who use the doorway as the equivalent of the old water cooler. And so are landlords and local governments.

"I think restricting smoking outdoors is the next major step in the nonsmoker rights movement," said John Banzhaf, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), a Washington-based antismoking group.

Besides more than 60 ordinances prohibiting smoking in various outdoor places, he said, there are "a growing number of restrictions by private entities, mostly businesses."

For example, Jack Resnick & Co. Inc., which owns and manages commercial office space in midtown and downtown Manhattan, recently banned smoking in front of the entrances to its buildings. In a memo to tenants, the company said it decided to take the action because of complaints about smokers crowding the doorways and cigarette butts littering the ground and overflowing from receptacles.

'MORE INCENTIVE TO QUIT'

Employers are also chasing smokers further from the doors. Some have provided special enclosed or partially enclosed structures, while others just ban smoking on the premises.

Thomas Close, director of Newark Renaissance House, an in-patient rehabilitation service in New Jersey for teenage drug addicts and alcoholics, said he and his co-workers have to walk down the block in order to smoke.

"It's more incentive to quit," he said. "We treat addiction here and our clients aren't supposed to smoke, so the staff shouldn't give any signs of the use of tobacco products. A lot of state licensing reflects that."

Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria, Oregon, recently got rid of its outdoor smoking bench and went smoke-free throughout its campus, the equivalent of three city blocks, but employees and patients are still allowed to smoke in their cars.

The private, nonprofit rural hospital promoted the new policy by holding a news conference, offering a "cold turkey" sandwich in the cafeteria and giving out licorice sticks, Marketing Director Arlene Layton said. "We're a health institution," she said, "and smoking is terribly unhealthy."

Between 15 and 30 of the 140 community hospitals in the Michigan Health and Hospital Association ban smoking anywhere on their property, said spokeswoman Sherry Mirasola. At least half of the members ban it in doorways and certain other outdoor areas.

Smoking in Michigan is more prevalent than the national average, she said, but the state has shown "a top-down, bottom-up commitment that we should be going against some of the behavior that brings people into hospitals."

Hospitals and health-care facilities bought about 40 percent of the 2,800 smoking shelters that Duo-Gard Industries has sold since it pioneered the product in 1990, Linda Byam, marketing director of the Canton, Michigan, company, said. Another 35 percent of sales have gone to the industrial sector, and 25 percent to various government entities.

The primary reason for the purchases? "To get the activity out of the doorways and end the confrontations between smokers and nonsmokers," Byam said.

GOVERNMENT STEPS IN

Local governments have also taken steps to keep areas of their towns--including doorways--smoke-free. Eugene, the second-largest city in Oregon behind Portland, and nearby Corvallis prohibit smoking within 10 feet (3 meters) of the entrances to businesses or public buildings as well as inside.

The Corvallis City Council, which enacted its ban in August 1997, decided it should include doorways because "people entering an office don't need to be subjected to clouds of smoke just because employees want to get their last drag in before work," Police Lt. Pat Mollahan said.

In the weeks after the ordinance took effect, he said, the city received "a handful" of complaints. "People wanted to see if we'd enforce it, and yes, we did," he said. "Now (compliance is) pretty much a given."

Eugene modeled its no-smoking ordinance after the one in Corvallis, Senior Policy Analyst Jan Bohman said. Before the city starts enforcing the law this July 1, she said, it will send out background information and posters for doors.

Giving smokers fair warning about new restrictions goes a long way toward averting enforcement problems, said ASH's Banzhaf, who remembers the skepticism that greeted a plan to ban smoking on elevators in New York in the 1970s.

"But we've found that every step we took has gone remarkably well," he said. "Once a rule goes into effect, if there's a reasonable timeframe to inform people--mostly with signs--most will comply. Only in extreme cases do you even begin to talk about enforcement."

In fact, even as light snow swirled around them on a recent day, office workers at a building in Manhattan's South Street Seaport area were obeying the "No Smoking" sign posted in the semi-enclosed entrance.

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