4.1/The Lived Worlds/Class and the City

Theoretical Framework: The Habitus of the Dual City

The Income Ceiling

That kind of ceiling had no equivalent in the labor market the same families worked in, which by 1989 was sorting people by a blunter and more familiar measure. By 1991, New York counted fewer people making things than it had employed on a base that stood near one million as recently as the 1950s: under two hundred thousand manufacturing jobs city-wide, a decline concentrated with unusual violence in the 1970s and still running through the recession at the decade’s other end.¹ The docks, the garment lofts, the small machine shops that had once given a school-leaver in Sunset Park or Long Island City a wage without a diploma, were, in bulk, gone or going. What replaced them was not obvious from a subway platform. It was legible on a balance sheet: the price a square foot, or a lease line, could be made to pay.

Robert Fitch’s 1993 account of the change, published as The Assassination of New York, argued that the substitution was not the passive drift of an aging industrial economy but a preference, engineered by the city’s own planning and real-estate apparatus, for land uses that paid more per square foot than a loft full of dressmakers ever could.² The argument had a documented predecessor. In November 1976, Roger Starr, at the time the city’s Housing and Development administrator, had proposed in the pages of the New York Times Magazine what he called “planned shrinkage” — a deliberate contraction of municipal services to depopulated blocks, on the premise that “a New York with a population even considerably smaller than the present 7.5 million people could be a very good city.”³ Starr’s proposal named neighborhoods, not industries, but the logic underneath it was the same logic Fitch later generalized to zoning, tax abatement, and the disposition of city-owned land: shrink the parts of the city that did not pay, and let land value do the rest of the sorting. Whether the mechanism was a single coordinated project, as Fitch held, or the compounding effect of thousands of uncoordinated decisions each individually rational, the outcome by 1989 was not in dispute. The zoning that had once reserved blocks of Manhattan for manufacturing was, piece by piece, rewritten for office towers, and the towers filled with people paid to move money rather than goods.

The manufacturing base that shrank across these twelve years had itself been the product of an older settlement, one in which shipping, garment production, and small-scale fabrication had given the city a working class with a geography of its own — walk-up blocks within streetcar or subway distance of a pier or a loft floor, rents pegged to a wage that no longer existed by 1989. The jobs did not return after the recession lifted. Commercial rents that a securities firm or a law partnership could absorb, and a cutting room could not, kept climbing on the other side of the twelve years the theorists writing in 1991 had already, in their separate vocabularies, described as a settled direction rather than a passing cycle.

The Command Center

Sociologist Saskia Sassen gave the resulting city a name in 1991: the “global city,” a category she applied jointly to New York, London, and Tokyo, each of which had ceased to compete chiefly as a place where things were produced and had become, instead, a place where the production of everywhere else was coordinated, financed, and insured.⁴ The command function required a dense concentration of lawyers, accountants, advertising executives, and investment bankers — the “producer services” that did not make a product but made every other firm’s product possible to sell, ship, and finance across a border. It was work that clustered by choice in a handful of towers within a few square miles of Midtown and downtown Manhattan, for reasons that had less to do with the price of the land than with the value of being a short walk from a competitor, a regulator, or a client.

Sassen’s argument had a second half that got less attention at the time: the same command function generated demand for a low-wage service tier that boomed alongside it rather than shrinking with manufacturing — the messengers who moved documents a modem could not yet move, the caterers and dog-walkers and dry cleaners who kept a partner able to work a sixteen-hour day, the building staffs who kept the new towers running through the night. A city organized around finance did not employ only financiers; it employed, in growing numbers, the people who freed financiers from every task beneath their hourly rate. Both tiers were products of the same restructuring, and rarely appeared in the same room except as employer and employee.

The Standard & Poor’s 500, a proxy for the corporate earnings that the FIRE sector increasingly existed to manage, closed November 1989 under 350; by the last weeks of 2001 it stood above 1,100, more than tripling across the twelve years even after two recessions and a market crash.⁵ The gain accrued overwhelmingly to people already positioned to hold equity, which was not most New Yorkers. The city’s homicide count, moving on a different axis entirely, fell from 1,905 in 1989 to 649 in 2001, a decline that made the FIRE-driven city feel safer at street level in the same years its labor market was dividing further underneath.⁶ A senior editor with a retirement account benefited from the same twelve years that eliminated the job of a machinist elsewhere in the city; neither of them, most days, connected the two events.

The Dual City

The same year Sassen’s book appeared, a companion volume gave the split a harder name. Dual City: Restructuring New York, edited by the political scientist John Mollenkopf and the sociologist Manuel Castells, gathered economists and urbanists — Sassen herself contributed a chapter — to argue that New York’s restructuring had not merely shifted the city’s center of gravity from goods to services; it had split the city’s labor market into two tiers with almost nothing connecting them.⁷ At the top, producer-services jobs paid enough to bid up co-op prices on the Upper East Side and brownstones in the neighborhoods just beginning to gentrify. At the bottom, the same restructuring generated a matching expansion of low-wage service work — the guards, messengers, cleaners, and delivery staff the towers needed to function — without the wage growth or the union protection the vanished factory jobs had once carried. A city could, on this account, show rising aggregate income and rising poverty in the same decade, because the growth and the poverty belonged to two different labor markets inside one set of city limits.

Taste Without a Common Measure

None of this fully explained why a bond trader with a fresh bonus and a schoolteacher’s grandson with an inherited, rent-stabilized lease could occupy, in the same decade, different positions in New York’s class order despite comparable incomes. For that, the period’s most useful theorist was not an economist but a sociologist of taste. Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction, translated into English in 1984, described class as something transmitted through “habitus” — an internalized, largely unconscious system of manners, preferences, and bodily comportment, acquired in childhood and legible to others as instantly and involuntarily as an accent.⁸ Money could be made in a single bonus cycle. Habitus, in Bourdieu’s account, could not be made that fast, and boards that ran co-op admissions screened for it directly, alongside a buyer’s finances.

At 740 Park Avenue, completed in 1930 and still, across the period, among the most restrictive cooperative addresses in the city, the board’s admissions process had for decades screened prospective owners on grounds that had nothing to do with their bank balance: manner, discretion, the right schools behind the right names.⁹ The building’s own postwar history, as later documented, showed the board easing its exclusion of Jewish buyers after the war while its resistance to Black buyers persisted through the century.⁹ A rejection by a board like 740 Park’s was rarely stated in the language of prejudice; it was stated in the language of “fit” — the polite term a co-op attorney used for the same screen Bourdieu called habitus. Across these twelve years, admission to an address like it turned on an interview a bank statement alone could not win.

The same logic ran through institutions that had nothing to do with real estate. A child moving through the era’s elite day and boarding schools and on to an Ivy League college acquired, along the way, a set of references, manners, and unhurried confidence that a state-school graduate of equal intelligence and, within a decade, equal income did not acquire. Bourdieu’s own term for the asset was cultural capital: a form of wealth that did not appear on a tax return, could not be spent directly, and nonetheless determined who was recognized, in a boardroom or a co-op interview, as one of the room’s own. The doorman who held the door at a building like 740 Park was paid in dollars alone for work that required no inherited manner at all, and stood all day beside people whose upbringing had counted, in that building, for as much as their income.

None of the period’s class fractions held still long enough to be captured by income alone. Old money, largely inherited and increasingly outnumbered, kept its cultural capital current even as its share of the city’s liquid wealth thinned; new money, flush with a bonus check unearned by any inherited manner, spent years learning a code — which fork, which club, which unmarked storefront restaurant — that a paycheck alone did not teach. A creative class paid reliably in neither dollars nor pedigree, living on masthead prestige and West Village rent, occupied a position the other two fractions found hard to place. The city’s classes, by these years, needed a taxonomy of their own — old money, new money, the creative fraction, the outer-borough middle, the working poor — before any single one of them could be described with precision.