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A Book From A Blogger About Disappearing New York
On an unseasonably pleasant July evening, the line outside Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in SoHo stretched down most of Crosby Street. Inside, it was standing room only as Jeremiah Moss, bearded and in a black T-shirt, read from his book, “Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul” (Dey Street, 2017). The book chronicles how (and why) a city of diners and delis morphed into a string of interchangeable blocks filled with forgettable stores of the sort that could be found in a Long Island strip mall.
For a decade, Mr. Moss has written the popular blog with the exhaustive title, “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York a.k.a. the Book of Lamentations: A Bitterly Nostalgic Look at a City in the Process of Going Extinct.” Concealing his identity behind a pen name, Mr. Moss gave voice to that sinking feeling you get when you walk past your favorite restaurant or bar or bookstore and discover that it has been replaced with a Chase bank.
The book is something of an unmasking for Mr. Moss, who revealed his real identity to The New Yorker in June. It turns out Mr. Moss is a 46-year-old psychoanalyst and social worker called Griffin Hansbury who lives in an East Village rent-stabilized walk-up apartment and prefers we still call him Jeremiah. Mr. Moss recycled a character’s name from an unpublished novel he wrote “about a guy who is going through a midlife crisis and he wants to kind of return to the past,” he told me. He has written a sequel, also unpublished.
If the blog is a requiem for places like the music club CBGB, St. Mark’s Bookshop and Mars Bar, the book tells the back story. New York may be a city forever changing, but Mr. Moss argues that this time something nefarious is afoot. He describes a global phenomenon he calls “hyper-gentrification,” in which political forces join hands with corporate interests to drive up prices and drive out poor people and the places they go. “The kind of change that we’re experiencing, that kind of change is really different from change as usual,” he said. “It’s change as unusual.”
At Housing Works, an audience member near the door called out: “So what are we going to do?” A man behind him grumbled, “There’s nothing we can do.”
More at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/realestate/a-book-from-a-blogger-about-disappearing-new-york.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share
For a decade, Mr. Moss has written the popular blog with the exhaustive title, “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York a.k.a. the Book of Lamentations: A Bitterly Nostalgic Look at a City in the Process of Going Extinct.” Concealing his identity behind a pen name, Mr. Moss gave voice to that sinking feeling you get when you walk past your favorite restaurant or bar or bookstore and discover that it has been replaced with a Chase bank.
The book is something of an unmasking for Mr. Moss, who revealed his real identity to The New Yorker in June. It turns out Mr. Moss is a 46-year-old psychoanalyst and social worker called Griffin Hansbury who lives in an East Village rent-stabilized walk-up apartment and prefers we still call him Jeremiah. Mr. Moss recycled a character’s name from an unpublished novel he wrote “about a guy who is going through a midlife crisis and he wants to kind of return to the past,” he told me. He has written a sequel, also unpublished.
If the blog is a requiem for places like the music club CBGB, St. Mark’s Bookshop and Mars Bar, the book tells the back story. New York may be a city forever changing, but Mr. Moss argues that this time something nefarious is afoot. He describes a global phenomenon he calls “hyper-gentrification,” in which political forces join hands with corporate interests to drive up prices and drive out poor people and the places they go. “The kind of change that we’re experiencing, that kind of change is really different from change as usual,” he said. “It’s change as unusual.”
At Housing Works, an audience member near the door called out: “So what are we going to do?” A man behind him grumbled, “There’s nothing we can do.”
More at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/realestate/a-book-from-a-blogger-about-disappearing-new-york.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share