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Two Dollar Bill Is Oddity, but Some Love the Tender

Matthew Zaklad used $2 bills to shop at the Union Square Greenmarket.Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Move over, Bitcoin. There is another uncommon tender angling for a spotlight, or in this case, a comeback: the $2 bill.

Heather McCabe is on a one-woman mission to revitalize the quirky greenback through deliberate casual use.

For others like Matthew Zaklad, who pours roughly 7,000 notes into circulation each year, the goal is to create meaningful interactions in otherwise mundane encounters.

In Ms. McCabe’s 15 years as an ambassador of the deuce, she has been flatly rejected at a bowling alley on Staten Island, was told to pay with something else at a bar in the East Village and is constantly solicited by people who want to buy her bills.

“Americans in America want to pay American money to buy American money?” she wrote on her blog, Two Buckaroo, where she documents reactions to twos.

There are one billion $2 bills in circulation, which may sound like a lot. But they account for only 3 percent of the total volume of notes, according to the Federal Reserve. The most plentiful denominations, the $1 and $100 bills, each number about 10 billion.

Twos continue to be printed every few years, based on demand. Forty-five million more of the bills, which have images of Thomas Jefferson on one side and the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the other, went into production last October at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing outpost in Fort Worth, the first run since 2009.

On a recent Friday afternoon, armed with her little black notebook and a heap of twos, Ms. McCabe, 39, a copy editor, bought a sandwich in Park Slope, Brooklyn, using a five, some ones and a two.

“I want to disabuse Americans of the idea that the $2 bill isn’t printed anymore,” she said.

“Hey, a two!” the cashier exclaimed. Ms. McCabe slid poker-faced out the door.

In 1992, Mr. Zaklad, 41, who works in the automotive industry, once covered his entire $400 rent in twos. More recently, he said, he dropped 200 twos on a dinner tab at WD50 on the Lower East Side. He tries to use the bills exclusively.

“The real benefit of the twos are in interacting with humanity,” Mr. Zaklad said. “It triggers memories of love, of other generations, of childhood.”

On a recent Saturday morning at the Union Square Greenmarket, Mr. Zaklad was on hand as a customer named Mark Matza, a bus driver who was off duty, refused a two from Andrew Cote, a beekeeper who intentionally doles out hundreds of twos a week through his honey business. Mr. Zaklad eventually persuaded Mr. Matza that it was legitimate tender.

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Mr. Zaklad used a $2 bill to make a Valentine’s Day gift for his wife.Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Last year the owner of Mr. Zaklad’s local deli near Union Square pulled him aside.

“Hey Mr. $2 Bill, not everyone wants your money,” Mr. Zaklad recalls him saying. “Look up your history on Jefferson and slavery.”

Still, many enthusiasts are working to see the bill flourish, a potentially quixotic labor as Americans overwhelmingly treat $2 notes as keepsakes or remain skeptical of their legitimacy.

River Allan, 32, a bartender in the East Village, receives several twos a month from customers.

“We’ll get into fights over who gets to keep the $2 bills,” Mr. Allan said of his fellow bartenders. He plans to create an art project from his stack of about 100. A co-worker sends them to friends in Europe who think it’s “funny money.”

On eBay, an ordinary two can fetch double its actual worth or a stack of 50 might go for $120.

The $2 bill, like the $1 bill, was introduced in 1862, but both were slow to replace dollar coins. Because of rising inflation, paper money eventually gained popularity for everyday transactions, yet the two always lagged behind the one.

On its website, the United States Treasury advises, “The key for successfully circulating the $2 bill is for retailers to use them just like any other denomination in their daily operations,” adding, as if sick of being pestered by $2 fans, “Neither the Department of the Treasury nor the Federal Reserve System can force the distribution or use of any denomination of currency on banks, businesses or individuals.”

The first film to look in depth at this note is expected out later this year. John Bennardo of Delray Beach, Fla., the filmmaker, is crossing the country to document the $2 bill, which continues to be associated with vice: strip clubs, gambling, bars.

Mr. Bennardo came to New York last month to film Ms. McCabe and others for his movie, “The 2 Dollar Bill Documentary.”

“This bill is a beautiful underdog. I think they appreciate its value as a United States artifact,” Mr. Bennardo said of this spirited community.

But as Mr. Zaklad attests, twos are often linked to deeply personal stories.

Myrta Gschaar recalls her parents’ saving $2 bills and half-dollar coins in a drawer at her childhood home; her mother earned many of them as a seamstress at a women’s underwear factory on Spring Street.

When her husband, Robert Gschaar, proposed to her at a restaurant on Wall Street in the late 1980s, he did not have an engagement ring to offer. He was a history devotee, and this would be the second marriage for them both. That night he pulled a pair of twos from his wallet, giving one to her. He explained that as long as they carried these twos, they would be united.

Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, her husband’s remains had yet to be found. A special property recovery unit at the Police Department notified Mrs. Gschaar that it had recovered personal items of Mr. Gschaar’s at ground zero. The items were a wedding ring and a wallet containing a neatly folded $2 bill.

“His $2 bill gave me some closure that he was gone, that he wasn’t wandering around with amnesia,” Mrs. Gschaar said in a phone call from Ohio, where she now lives. “Because a lot of family members were saying, ‘What if he’s still out there?’ ”

Mrs. Gschaar donated both bills, the wallet and the ring to the Sept. 11 museum, where they are to be displayed.

“It was well fitted for him, since he loves his history, and now he is a part of history,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Love the Tender? $2 Bill Is Still an Oddity. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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