4.10/The Lived Worlds/Class and the City

The Texture of Money, 1989–2001

The Window and the Hold

The stub told its own class story before the check was cashed. A non-union editorial stub at a Midtown magazine ran eight to ten lines of deductions down from gross — federal withholding, Social Security, the Medicare line that a 1991 change had split out onto its own row, state tax, city tax, a health premium, a pension or retirement contribution — reducing the gross to a net the holder rarely studied. A unionized hospital stub carried a different vocabulary in the same columns: dues to 1199SEIU near a percent and a half of gross, a shift differential adding time-and-a-half for the evening tour, accrued sick and vacation hours logged in their own boxes, a health premium for a union plan worth having. The corporate stub and the institutional stub were printed on different stock, and the money they described behaved differently the moment it left the page.

The geography made the two experiences visible on the street. The map of where the licensed outlets stood was close to a photographic negative of where the bank branches were: dense along Fordham Road and up Broadway through Washington Heights, along East 149th Street in the South Bronx, thin to absent on the Upper East Side, where a block held a Citibank instead. The walk north from the 2 train at East 149th Street to Lincoln Hospital passed three or four cashing windows; the walk into the Meridian lobby on Madison Avenue passed none. The storefronts were narrow — a former deli or dry-cleaner repurposed, fluorescent, linoleum underfoot, the queue reaching the door by Friday afternoon. At the window a scratched plastic barrier and a steel tray that slid under it, a clerk who asked for two forms of identification, a fee board posted above: a percentage for payroll checks, a dollar or so for a money order, a slot for paying the Con Edison bill without a second trip.

The cost of that liquidity was real and it recurred. At six to eight dollars a week, cashing a paycheck ran to three or four hundred dollars a year — the annual price of being paid in a form the neighborhood banks would not honor fast enough. Payomatic was the dominant chain by the early 1990s, RiteCheck and dozens of independents working the same model beside it, and the window did more than cash checks: money orders for the rent, because a personal check assumed a checking account and the account assumed a minimum balance; bill payment for the utilities; wire transfers home. Direct deposit promised to dissolve the whole errand, and it arrived unevenly. By 1993 perhaps two-thirds of a Midtown magazine’s staff had enrolled; the holdouts were the newer hires and those with complicated accounts, and their first checks came as paper by default, an existing account and a voided check required before the payroll department could route the money to a bank at all.

The Machine in the Lobby

The automated teller had been infrastructure in Manhattan since before the decade began. Citibank’s chairman had committed more than a hundred million dollars to a cash-machine network across the five boroughs in 1977, and the technology proved itself in the blizzards of January 1978, when the branches closed for days and machine use rose about twenty percent as the city dug out — the moment the bank turned into the advertising claim that it never slept.¹ By 1989 the machine was ordinary rather than novel, and its texture was the texture of a small daily negotiation: a paper sign taped over the screen reading out of service, a machine emptied of cash by Friday evening, a daily withdrawal limit near three hundred dollars, a PIN entered on recessed keys worn pale, a receipt on thermal paper already fading as its holder walked away. By the early 1990s the behavioral adjustments had hardened into reflex — a glance over the shoulder before the PIN, the bills pocketed without a public count, the machine avoided after midnight. The robbery at the cash slot was a recognized category, and the state’s ATM Safety Act answered it in 1996 with mandated cameras, mirrors, and locking vestibule doors.²

The fee was the part that sorted the users. Until the first of April, 1996, the Visa and MasterCard network rules forbade a surcharge for using another bank’s machine; when the two networks repealed the ban that spring, the charge spread fast. About thirty-nine percent of institutions operating machines imposed a surcharge in 1997, at an average near a dollar and seventeen cents, and within a year or two the fee had gone from exceptional to ordinary across the city’s machines.³ For a household on a weekly budget the surcharge was a live calculation — the Chemical Bank machine near the office free to its own customers, the machine in another bank’s lobby a dollar or more to everyone else — and the four-block walk to one’s own bank was a discipline that people with money simply did not perform. The asymmetry was legible in a single gesture at a single machine. One person withdrew two hundred dollars without first checking a balance and pocketed the bills without counting; another checked the balance first, knowing it might not yet reflect the checks already written against it, took out forty, and counted the bills on the sidewalk. It was the same machine and two different amounts of room to be wrong.

The Balance

What made the difference cumulative rather than momentary was the credit card, and the card’s economics had been set loose a decade earlier. The Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha let a bank export its home state’s interest ceiling to borrowers anywhere, and the state-by-state deregulation that followed allowed card issuers to charge, in the early 1990s, fifteen to twenty percent and more.⁴ Pre-approved solicitations arrived by mail, two and three a week at a single address. For an editorial assistant earning roughly eighteen thousand dollars against an East Village rent near six hundred a month, the offer was not temptation but arithmetic: after taxes and rent the remaining few hundred dollars had to cover food, transit, clothing, and whatever social life a magazine job required, and the card closed the gap. Across the country the gap was closing the same way. The share of cardholders carrying a balance from month to month climbed from roughly half in 1989 toward three in five by 2001, and the aggregate credit-card debt in America nearly tripled over those years, from about two hundred and thirty-eight billion dollars to about six hundred and ninety-two billion.⁵

The card also signaled rank, the way the watch and the address did. The American Express Gold was a charge card rather than a credit line — it required payment in full each month, and carrying it announced that its holder could clear the balance and did not need to borrow; its annual fee was a sum paid for the privilege of not needing credit, and it was the card that went to the expense-account lunch, handed to the waiter without a look at the bill and reimbursed by the magazine within the month. The bank-issued Visa or MasterCard in a thinner wallet was the one that revolved, and its issuer had designed the minimum-payment line so that the balance never quite disappeared. The physical transaction dated itself. Into the mid-1990s a small restaurant or a deli still pressed the card into an imprinter, and the swipe terminal that displaced it after 1997 brought a new question to the counter — credit or debit — and a new speed to the spending.

The two relations to the card were legible in the physical contents of a wallet. An executive’s billfold held cards as its primary weight — a Gold charge card, a personal Visa rarely used and paid in full when it was, a bank machine card, a license kept as identification in a city that seldom asked — with eighty or a hundred dollars in cash present because it was convenient rather than counted, and a collection of business cards received rather than given. A junior wallet, a twelve-dollar nylon bifold from a Fordham Road shop, held no credit card at all in the early years but the first application declined, a secured card with a three-hundred-dollar limit built toward by 1991, a bank machine card, a token holder or later a MetroCard, and twenty-five or forty dollars in cash that had been counted and would be counted again. One wallet was opened at a restaurant and the card handed over without a glance at the bill; the other was opened at a deli, exact change assembled to keep from breaking a twenty. Neither gesture was a temperament; each marked a different degree of security.

At the end of the arithmetic sat bankruptcy, and the shame attached to it was itself class-specific. Chapter 7 discharged unsecured debt — cards, medical bills, personal loans — within months of filing, for a filing fee near two hundred dollars and an attorney’s fee of several hundred more, at the cost of a ten-year notation on a credit record. Personal filings set a record of roughly 1.35 million in 1997, the working and middle classes using a legal mechanism corporate America used as routine tooling.⁶ Donald Trump, whose Atlantic City casino company had entered Chapter 11 in 1991, made the asymmetry explicit: at the top a filing was a restructuring instrument, discussed without apology, and at the bottom it was a moral event, entered under a shame the balance sheet did not recognize.

The Notice on the Door

Rent was the one payment that made the whole difference visible once a month, and it was paid, at both ends of the scale, by personal check. In a rent-stabilized apartment held since 1980 the ritual was muscle memory: the checkbook with its carbon-backed duplicate, the memo line naming the month and the apartment, the check dropped at the super’s door or in the lobby box marked for it, the amount fixed by law and familiar to the point of invisibility. The check register at the front of the book was the household’s authoritative ledger — each number entered with date, payee, and running balance, the record of what had been spent before the bank knew it. For a tenant whose footing was less certain — a copy assistant on an employer-sponsored visa in an Alphabet City studio, whose legal presence in the country hung on the job — the same check carried a different weight. A bounced payment or a landlord dispute that generated a paper trail threatened more than the apartment, and so the check went early, hand-delivered where possible, photocopied and filed with its receipt — the care of a status a paper trail could revoke.

Late rent moved through a fixed choreography, and its first instrument was a piece of paper on a door. The landlord could not simply evict; the law required a three-day notice demanding the overdue rent, then, if it went unpaid, a filing in Housing Court at 111 Centre Street in lower Manhattan, and finally a city marshal with a warrant. Most situations resolved before the courtroom — a payment made, an arrangement struck — but the court itself was a specific and legible place: wooden benches, a clerk’s window, cases moving through in blocks, tenants appearing without counsel against landlords who arrived with it, and over all of it the yellowing fluorescent light and the smell of institutional cleaning fluid that marked every government waiting room in the city. The three-day notice taped to the door was the whole precarity compressed into a single document, and the households that never received one and the households that knew its exact wording lived, on this point, in different cities.

The Wire

For a large share of the people who kept the offices running, the month’s most consequential transaction was the one that left the country. The Western Union counter was as legible a neighborhood marker as a bodega — its yellow-and-black storefronts standing on 161st Street in the Bronx, on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, on Dyckman Street in Washington Heights, a map of remittance laid over the map of immigration. The transfer was a cash transaction: bills and a fee handed across the counter, a form naming the recipient and the destination, a confirmation number carried away and relayed home by telephone, the money collectable the same day at an agent in another country. The fee ran to something near a tenth of the amount sent in the early 1990s, so that sending two hundred dollars home cost the better part of twenty, and the calculation of how much to send against how much to keep was present every time. The alternative belonged to people with bank accounts at both ends: a wire from a Citibank branch to a bank in Europe for thirty or forty dollars and a three-day wait, the foreign routing numbers required exactly, a single wrong digit adding a week. The remittance economy did not appear on any masthead. It lived in the building’s basement and in the Saturday routines of the staff who cleaned the floors the editors worked on.