8.6/The Lived Worlds/Fashion and Material Culture

Working-Class Material Culture: The Morris Heights Apartment

One Number, Voted Once a Year

On the living-room wall of that same fourth-floor walk-up, a different kind of record accumulated on its own schedule, one the Board’s arithmetic never touched: three decades sat one behind the other, and none of them had been removed. Under a dozen coats of paint lay the original 1920s plaster — pre-war lath and horsehair, a picture rail running the room’s perimeter, cracked faintly where the building had settled over sixty years. Laid over that, from a landlord’s cut-rate rehabilitation sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s, ran the visible seams of a later decade: vinyl base molding glued rather than nailed, a ceiling medallion painted shut where a chandelier had once hung, a single fluorescent ring fixture wired in after a code inspection. And fixed on top of both, added rather than replacing anything, hung a Sacred Heart of Jesus in a gilt frame beside a portrait of John F. Kennedy in a matching frame — a pairing familiar enough in Latino households across the Bronx through the middle 1990s that it read less as decoration than as a household’s own timeline, displayed rather than dated. Nothing on that wall had ever come down, and nothing in the rooms behind it had either — a household economy in which new things arrived rarely enough that old things simply stayed.

The apartment itself was one of thousands like it in Morris Heights: a five- or six-story brick walk-up built to a railroad plan, rooms strung off a single long hallway with the kitchen at one end and the living room at the other, one bathroom serving the whole unit, cast-iron radiators in every room, in a rent-stabilized building whose tenants, almost without exception, had never owned the unit they lived in. What distinguished any one of these apartments from its neighbors was not its layout but its accumulation — the specific, economically logical choices a household had made across years and had no occasion, and often no means, to unmake. A renovation happened once, when the landlord judged it necessary. A purchase happened once, on layaway or credit, and then stayed. The apartment did not get redecorated. It got added to.

Late in the year, the light that crossed that wall told a related story. At the Bronx’s latitude the sun climbed barely a third of the way up the winter sky even at solar noon, and the day ran short — sunrise near seven, sunset before four-thirty — which left most of the daylight hours slanted rather than overhead.² The five- and six-story walk-ups along University Avenue stood close enough to open sky that a fourth-floor window took in a wide dome of it, and the dark brick facing the block absorbed most of what fell on it rather than bouncing it back, so a south-facing room received its light direct and warm instead of diffused. Forty blocks south and a world away, the same November sun reached a Midtown office tower through a slot of sky cut narrow by thirty- and forty-story limestone, arriving as a cooler, glass-reflected glow. The wall with three decades on it took the other kind of light: low, amber, and uninterrupted, crossing the floor in a single beam for most of a winter afternoon.

Six-Thirty in the Morning

The radiator had already announced the day before anything else did.

The boiler itself sat in the basement, tended by a superintendent who fired it on a timer calibrated to the code rather than to any particular tenant’s comfort, and who answered, when a radiator went silent in January, to a call routed through the landlord’s management office rather than to the tenant directly. A cold radiator was a violation the city’s housing department could in principle enforce; in practice it was a complaint logged, a visit scheduled, and a wait measured in days rather than hours. The system worked, most winters, well enough that a cold radiator in January was the exception a tenant registered and called about, not the rule.

By the time the radiator finished its sequence, the street outside had begun its own. The BX12 pulled north along Fordham Road on its crosstown run; a garbage truck worked a block at a time, its compactor cycling in a hydraulic crunch; sirens, at any hour, were close to constant. Underneath all of it, in a year when New York recorded roughly a hundred and forty-seven thousand stolen vehicles citywide — the peak of the decade, one car taken for every few hundred residents — ran the six-tone cycle of a car alarm nobody had come down to silence.⁴ Through a single-pane window with worn weatherstripping, the alarm carried into the apartment at something close to ordinary conversation volume: present, specific, and, after enough winters, no longer registered as sound at all.

What the Landlord Left and What the Tenant Added

The kitchen floor was sheet vinyl, not true linoleum — printed, patterned to imitate brick or stone, laid in a wide roll sometime in the renovation years and, by the late 1980s, curling at the seams near the sink. The countertop was Formica in a butcher-block or faux-marble laminate, chipped at the corners, scorched in a small crescent near the stove where a pot had sat too long. The range was a white thirty-inch gas model with standing pilot lights that a tenant relit by hand after every gas-company interruption, its chrome drip pans yellowed, one control knob a mismatched replacement the building superintendent had pulled from a supply closet rather than order new. The bathroom carried the same layer: a pedestal sink and a cast-iron tub original to the building, a medicine cabinet with a mirrored door that no longer closed flush, tile from a mid-century patch job that did not quite match the tile it had replaced. None of it had been chosen by the person who lived there. It had been chosen, cheaply, by whoever managed the building in the year the landlord decided a renovation was owed.

What the tenant chose sat on top of the landlord’s layer and read differently. A twenty-five-inch Zenith console television, the last brand still assembled at an American plant into 1990, occupied a laminate stand bought to hold it.⁵ A black plastic clock radio with red LED digits sat on the Formica counter, cheap enough to have come from any drugstore or five-and-dime, and woke the household most mornings tuned to whatever station whoever had set it last preferred. A framed wedding photograph, decades old, hung near the Sacred Heart and the Kennedy portrait. Each object marked a year and a decision — a purchase made when money allowed it, kept afterward because there was no reason, and rarely the means, to replace something that still worked.

The Room From Seaman’s

The living-room sofa had come, like a large share of Bronx living rooms in the 1980s, from Seaman’s Furniture — by 1989 the second-largest furniture retailer in the country, thirty-one stores and roughly two hundred seventy-five million dollars in annual revenue, built on the strength of a jingle, “See Seaman’s First,” that ran constantly on New York television through the decade.⁶ Kohlberg Kravis Roberts had taken the company private in a leveraged buyout agreed in late 1987, a transaction that left Seaman’s carrying debt its own operating profit could not service; the chain filed for Chapter 11 in January 1992.⁷ None of that was visible from the showroom floor, where a family bought a matching sofa, loveseat, and coffee table on a layaway plan and carried nothing else away that day. The set arrived floral-printed, plastic-slipcovered against wear, and built to outlast the layaway payments: it did not match anything acquired before or after it, and it did not need to.

Layaway, not rent-to-own, was the standard route into that furniture for a household with steady income and no cushion — a deposit down, the balance paid over months, delivery on the day the last payment cleared. Rent-to-own storefronts were expanding aggressively into neighborhoods like Morris Heights across the same years, offering the same furniture for a fraction of the weekly cost and a far larger total; a household that could manage layaway generally avoided the difference. The sofa that came home under those terms in 1989 stayed the identifiable center of the room for over a decade — reupholstered in nothing, replaced by nothing, eventually wearing a slipcover of its own over the plastic that had already been protecting it.

The rest of the room filled in around it on the same terms. A console television sat on a wood-veneer stand with a wood-grained videocassette recorder on top, bought once the machines had grown affordable enough for a working household rather than a novelty for one with money to spare. A velvet painting — horses, or a scene from the island a grandparent had left — hung in the hallway; a plain wood crucifix hung over the front door. In the bedroom, a dark-stained particleboard headboard came from the same Seaman’s floor plan as the living-room set, and later, from the Caldor on Bruckner Boulevard, a set of polyester sheets bought to replace ones worn through at the corners. None of it had cost much. All of it outlasted the years it was expected to.

The Hierarchy of Wrapping

The kitchen’s cheapest objects carried the most information — more, in their way, than the furniture, because no one had chosen them to be seen. A brown paper bag, printed with a grocer’s name, was folded flat behind the refrigerator, kept for a second or third use as an outer wrapper rather than thrown out with whatever it had carried home; paper still dominated New York grocery checkouts in these years, the plastic bag only beginning its slow takeover of the register. Cut-Rite wax paper — the Reynolds brand that had defined the category since a Hoboken paper-machine maker introduced the roll-and-serrated-cutter box in 1927 — wrapped a sandwich for a lunch carried to work.⁸ A margarine tub from Country Crock, the three-pound brown plastic container the Shedd’s Spread division had introduced in 1982, held the previous night’s leftovers, reused for exactly as long as it survived a dishwashing.⁹

Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil, when the meal was cornbread or a chicken thigh rather than a sandwich, did the same job in a heavier material. An empty Wonder Bread bag, its printed dots still legible on the plastic, was saved rather than thrown out with the loaf and put back into service holding chips or cookies. Ziploc sandwich bags existed by 1989, with a clear press-to-close seal rather than the colored zipper strip the brand introduced later — Ziploc added color to the closure only in 1997 — but they cost more per use than a reused bag or a fold of wax paper, and a household working to a weekly budget spent them on whatever most needed sealing rather than on everything.¹⁰

The logic was consistent across every object in that hierarchy: the cheaper and more replaceable the wrapping, the further from home it was allowed to travel. A lunch wrapped in Cut-Rite and carried in a reused margarine tub could be left behind, forgotten, or lost without loss. The Tupperware never left the kitchen. The distinction cost nothing to maintain and organized the entire economy of the shelf.

1989, 1994, 1998, 2001

In November 1989 the household of record was a single wage-earner, established in the apartment for the better part of a decade, and the apartment held what that decade of steady, unspectacular income could buy on layaway: the Seaman’s suite, the Zenith console, the Sacred Heart and the Kennedy portrait, a particleboard bedroom set from the same store. It was not yet one of the city’s kinship-care cases. Within a few years, it was one of them too.

By 1994 the household had taken in one or two grandchildren whose mother could not care for them, supported by the same child-only grant, calculated by age rather than household need. Nationally and in New York specifically, the pattern had a name and a growing academic literature: grandmothers, disproportionately Black, assuming sudden or negotiated permanent care of grandchildren orphaned in practice by the crack epidemic and, increasingly, by AIDS.¹¹ The Seaman’s furniture, five years old, was still there; a thirty-two-inch tube television and a video-game console had joined it, a microwave bought at the Caldor on Bruckner Boulevard sat on the kitchen counter, and a cordless telephone, bought for well under fifty dollars, had appeared on the nightstand.

By 1998 the Caldor on Bruckner Boulevard had been in Chapter 11 for three years, selling down its stock rather than restocking it, its last stores not yet shut.¹² What began, slowly, to take its place in the borough’s discount-retail geography were national chains still new to the city: Target had opened its first New York–area stores in the suburbs beyond the city line by the late 1990s, years before any store reached the Bronx itself.¹³ In the apartment, a beige computer tower and a monitor had joined the entertainment center, dialing into a service through a modem at fifty-six kilobits; a grandchild’s shelf of trading cards and small plastic figures had claimed a corner of the bedroom.

By 2001 the grandmother was raising two teenagers on her own, the furniture from 1989 still load-bearing: the Seaman’s sofa, twelve years old, wore a slipcover over its original plastic. The console television was gone, replaced by a flatter, larger tube model bought at a big-box electronics store. The dial-up connection had become a subscription DSL line. A bedspread printed with characters from Toy Story 2, in theaters since the fall of 1999, was already fading at the corners where the sun reached it most afternoons. The Sacred Heart and the Kennedy portrait had not moved from the wall they had occupied since before any of it. Three layers were legible in that living room at once: the building’s original 1920s construction, the furniture bought once and never replaced, and the electronics that arrived one machine at a time without displacing anything that came before them. The fourth-floor window, on a clear November afternoon, still received the same low sun at the same angle it had received in 1989.