Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Vanishing New York
WORK NOTES: under pseud Jeremiah Moss
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: c. 1971
WEBSITE: http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
aka Jeremiah Moss * https://ny.curbed.com/2017/6/19/15832020/vanishing-new-york-jeremiah-moss-identity * https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/an-activist-for-new-yorks-mom-and-pop-shops * https://www.harpercollins.com/cr-125600/jeremiah-moss
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1971.
EDUCATION:New York University, masters degree from the Creative Writing Program.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Novelist, journalist, and poet. Psychoanalyst in private practice in New York, NY.
AWARDS:New York Foundation of the Arts, artist fellowship, 1999; Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Prize; Academy of American Poets awards.
WRITINGS
Writer of articles, poetry, and fiction for periodicals, including New York Times, New York Daily News, and online for the New Yorker, Paris Review, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and Dan Kennedy’s Really Small Talk; contributor to “This American Life.”
SIDELIGHTS
Blogger Griffin Hansbury writes his award-winning blog Vanishing New York under the pseudonym Jeremiah Moss. He has published a book of poetry, Day For Night Poems 1990-1999 and the novel, The Nostalgist, and has written articles, poetry, and fiction for such publications as New York Times, the New York Daily News, and The New Yorker. He is also a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.
Day for Night Poems 1990-1999 and The Nostalgist
Hansbury published Day for Night Poems 1990-1999 to pay homage to New York City’s night life, streets, color and light, and cinematic quality. He evokes nostalgia and observes the sunset against the Empire State Building, a table at a Chelsea diner, and the blue whale at the Museum of Natural History. His poems are a love song to the city, holding on to details, and highlighting city events.
In 2012, Hansbury published his debut novel, the dark comedy The Nostalgist. Set in post-September 11, 2001 New York City, lonely old man, Jonah Soloway, has retreated from life into his vintage collectables and comic books. He was orphaned as a boy when he mother died in a car accident. Now, he longs for human companionship. Answering one of the many Missing posters after the terrorist event, Jonah calls Vivian, a woman looking for her missing daughter, Rose. To gain attention and sympathy, Jonah tells an innocent lie that eventually grows out of control. When Rose’s ghost begins to haunt him, he reaches out to psychoanalyst Jane, but even he can’t tell illusion from reality.
Vanishing New York
Hansbury, writing as Jeremiah Moss, followed up with the nonfiction 2017 Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, an outgrowth of his popular blog. In the book, he offers cultural commentary on the gentrification of twenty-first century New York City. Once accommodating bohemian artists and writers, the city has been transformed into a luxury metropolis affordable only for the one percent. In the book, Moss offers a guide through beloved neighborhoods and treasured landmarks that have lost their charm and character because they have been converted into upscale boutiques, luxury condo towers, and suburban chain retailers. Bankers, investors, yuppies, and city mayors are to blame for their greed, hypergentrification, and government policies that has caused the city to lose its identity and diversity, and its changing social class. In a cantankerous, snarky style, Moss examines urban renewal and its repercussions on the world renowned city.
Commiserating the drastic changes in the city, Moss described his feelings writing the book in an interview with Nathan Kensinger online at Curbed: “I want it to be a body of evidence—this happened, this happened, this happened. When you lay it all out like that, it’s undeniable,” said Moss. “It is not a natural change. It’s very deliberate, it’s very planned. It’s from policies, and the policies have values behind them, and the values are very clear. They favor the already better off.”
In Booklist, Mark Levine noted: “This is a very good, angrily passionate, and ultimately saddening book.” Levine added that in Moss’s brilliantly written and researched account, Moss evokes a feeling that the city “is dissolving in a welter of unthinkable expense.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews said: “Happily, the jargon mostly gives way to plainspoken language of anger at the disappearance of places like the old Times Square…a vigorous, righteously indignant book.”
Wondering if readers do or don’t “share Moss’s heartfelt belief that New York City has lost its soul, this polemic is likely to stir a lot of emotions,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly. In Moss’s inspiring book, he presents “a relevant lamentation of New York’s rebellious, nonconformist past and its path toward an inexpressive mélange of glass and steel big box stores and chain restaurants. Each chapter delivers an obituary of the neighborhoods and boroughs,” said Basil Smilke Jr. on the New York Journal of Books Website.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2017, Mark Levine, review of Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, p. 19.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2017, review of Vanishing New York.
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, review of Vanishing New York, p. 59.
ONLINE
Curbed, https://ny.curbed.com/ (August 24, 2017), Nathan Kensinger, author interview.
New York Journal of Books Online, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (April 1, 2017), Basil Smilke Jr., review of Vanishing New York.
JEREMIAH MOSS, creator of the award- winning blog Vanishing New
York, is the pen name of Griffin Hansbury. His writing on the city has
appeared in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and online
for The New Yorker and The Paris Review. As Hansbury, he is the author
of The Nostalgist, a novel, and works as a psychoanalyst in private
practice in New York City.
Praise for Vanishing New York:
“Essential reading for fans of Jane Jacobs, Joseph Mitchell, Patti Smith, Luc Sante, and cheap pierogi.” –Vanity Fair
“This is a very good, angrily passionate, and ultimately saddening book…. a brilliantly written and well-informed account.” –Booklist, starred review
“Vanishing New York is an urban-activist polemic in the tradition of Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities: Every page is charged with Moss’s deep love of New York. It is both a vital and unequivocally depressing read.” –Village Voice
"a vigorous, righteously indignant book that would do Jane Jacobs proud." --Kirkus
“This polemic is likely to stir a lot of emotions.”—Publishers Weekly
“A relevant lamentation of New York’s rebellious, nonconformist past and its path toward an inexpressive mélange of glass and steel big box stores and chain restaurants.”
--New York Journal of Books
Searching for New York City’s lost soul
A walk through the East Village with Vanishing New York’s Jeremiah Moss
By Nathan Kensinger Aug 24, 2017, 10:00am EDT
Photography by Nathan Kensinger
SHARE
Some say the East Village is dead, Manhattan has been murdered, and New York City has lost its soul. Some say that if you stand in the right place and squint hard enough, it can almost seem like the old city is still alive.
Jeremiah Moss likes to think of the city as a crime scene, which he is investigating for clues, searching for the cause of death.
In his new book, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, Moss sets out to chronicle what, exactly, has gone wrong with New York, where greed, hypergentrification, and government policies have conspired to kill off the unique character of dozens of neighborhoods.
“I want it to be a body of evidence—this happened, this happened, this happened. When you lay it all out like that, it’s undeniable,” says Moss during a recent walk around the East Village. “It is not a natural change. It’s very deliberate, it’s very planned. It’s from policies, and the policies have values behind them, and the values are very clear. They favor the already better off.”
Blarney Cove, demolished in 2014.
Moss has lived in the East Village since 1994, and is now surrounded by evidence of its demise. Punk bars have been replaced by bank branches. Flophouses have been emptied out and turned into high-end hotels. Artist’s studios have become exclusive restaurants. Pierogi shops are now luxury boutiques, and lunch counters have become chain restaurants. A few plaques are scattered here and there, honoring the cultures that have been displaced, but for the most part, the East Village has lost its vibrant heart.
“I don’t think it’s quite dead—it’s mostly dead,” says Moss, who has documented the closing of many of his favorite neighborhood haunts, from the Amato Opera House to the Blarney Cove. “There’s not that many places left that I want to go into, and that makes it difficult. But I do find that Tompkins Square Park is still Tompkins Square Park, and I am often heartened when I go in there and see that the soul, if you want to call it that, of the East Village is still alive.”
“We all have our own lost city. If we stick around long enough, we lose the city of our youth, our dreams, and foiled ambitions,” he writes in Vanishing New York. “But this book isn’t about how we all lose our personal city. It’s about how the city has been taken from us. It’s not just the story of a death; it’s the story of a murder.”
Surma Book & Music Company, closed in 2016.
For the past decade, Moss has been tirelessly chronicling the death of New York City’s mom-and-pops on his blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. As the website gradually developed a wide following, writing a book seemed like an inevitable next step. But Moss, it was recently revealed, is actually the pen name of Griffin Hansbury, a psychoanalyst and social worker by day, and a poet and author by night. And Hansbury did not want Moss to become the dominant literary identity.
“I did not want to do the book,” Moss explains (he prefers to go by his nom de plume when talking about Vanishing New York). “I had written a few novels, and I really wanted to get them published, and nobody wanted them. But people kept telling me ‘you have to write this other book, you have to write the Vanishing New York book.’ So I did it under duress in the beginning. And then it just clicked together. I realized that the book was going to enable me to tell the whole story.”
The book version of Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York does away with much of the blog’s episodic structure, and instead of adopting a nostalgic coffee-table format, it aspires toward much larger ideas, encompassing sociology, urban studies, and a historic sweep going back to the 1800s. Because of the author’s background, however, it never feels like a dry academic work; it is instead a blend of personal memoir, biting observations, and copiously researched background.
Weighing in at a hefty 465 pages, Vanishing New York squeezes an enormous amount of detail into its 27 chapters, including long lists of shuttered businesses and vanquished shopkeepers. If New York City has 8 million stories, than at least 4,650 are referenced in the book, which will serve as an invaluable resource to future scholars of the city. As its narrative moves north through Manhattan, visiting neighborhoods that have been gutted in recent decades—the Bowery, the Meatpacking District, Times Square, Harlem—it is interspersed with deeper considerations of how we got here as a society.
Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema, due to close in 2018.
Its liveliest sections recount Moss’s own stories of loss, which include wandering the halls of the Chelsea Hotel on its last night in business, crying alone over blueberry blintzes during the final days of the Edison Cafe, and visiting the Playpen in Times Square for one last interaction with a “live nude girl.” Over the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that what Moss has been chronicling over the past decade is a deeply personal story.
After a while, though, readers may find themselves numb to the overwhelming scenes of destruction in Vanishing New York. Like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, the painful repetition of so many neighborhoods being bulldozed begins to blur together into one larger crime scene, where the blood stains haven’t really had a chance to dry. For those who have lived through the city’s many recent losses, the book may still be too raw to consume.
Nevertheless, Vanishing New York has clearly hit a nerve; profiles of Moss appeared in every major New York publication this summer, which has been a mixed blessing for its formerly anonymous author.
“It’s been both wonderful and overwhelming, and I am sick seeing myself everywhere,” says Moss, as we sip egg creams at Yonah Schimmel on Houston Street. “I feel both grateful and fortunate, and like I want to hide and go back, and say ‘leave me alone,’ like Greta Garbo. I am 46, and I have been writing since high school, one thing or another, trying to get published, trying to get heard, and having very little success at that. And so, to finally have an audience that’s listening and appreciating it, I don’t know that I have the words for it yet.”
For now, Moss is still able to walk down the streets of his neighborhood largely unrecognized, though a couple friendly readers have already approached him on the street. And he still has a handful of old places left that he likes to visit.
“The East Village still has a few things worth staying for.… We still have a couple bookstores, a few places to get a real egg cream, and a last record shop or two,” Moss writes in Vanishing New York. “So I stay, but more and more, I wonder why.”
Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery has been on Houston Street since 1910, making it one of the oldest establishments still remaining in the neighborhood. Countless other stores, restaurants, and galleries have closed in the last decade, as a result of gentrification and rising rents.
Inside the bakery, a handful of regulars enjoy their daily knish. “When you ask me about the neighborhood, it’s a big question,” says Moss, reflecting on the East Village’s hyper-gentrification and a rapid influx of wealth. “It is physical space that’s changed, the shops and the businesses. But the part that I really want to try to get across is that when we see the closing of these little shops, that’s the toxic fruit of this system.”
“I think too often people get stuck on the nostalgia of it,” says Moss. “They tell themselves these things which I think are memes, like ‘this is normal, New York is always changing, people have always complained about New York changing, going back to the 1800s.’ We’ve all been brainwashed.”
At the nearby corner of East First Street and Second Avenue, a luxury apartment tower and bank branch have replaced Mars Bar, one of the most storied dives in New York City. “That’s always the leap, from something democratic or useful to something high, high end,” says Moss. “The juxtapositions are so stark.”
Demolished in 2011, the Mars Bar was replaced by Jupiter 21, which offers “the finest luxury rental apartments in the East Village.” The new building also houses the Alchemist’s Kitchen, a “whole plant tonic bar” that offers nutrient IV drips, an infrared sauna, and a cryotherapy lounge. “You can’t make this shit up,” says Moss. “This is not an equilibrium. This is insane.”
Moss points out that one of the only reminders of the old, gritty bar are two large photographs displayed in the lobby of Jupiter 21. “This was one of the last old dive bars, back in the day,” a Jupiter 21 resident says. “They replaced it to make housing for yuppies. Make the East Village great again!”
Three blocks away from the Mars Bar, fresh graffiti and a plaque mark the site of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s old studio on Great Jones Street. From the outside, the building still looks like a piece of the old neighborhood.
Inside, however, the building now houses Japan Premium Beef, which sells $130-per-pound wagyu beef, and Bohemian, an exclusive invite-only restaurant. “I try to be really careful about not saying all rich people are evil. I don’t believe that,” explains Moss. “I do believe that we have a society that values greed. This is part of why we have the government we have now. This is why things are falling apart.”
Nathan Kensinger
The White House Hotel, one of the last flophouses on the Bowery, closed its doors in 2014. Only six residents remain in the building, despite being offered buyouts by the new owner, according to an employee. “That’s the connection I really want to make with this book,” says Moss. “It’s this battle between the haves and have-nots. The people who have power and the people who do not have power.”
A new restaurant is planned for the former flophouse’s lobby. “I think it’s important to talk about what happens when there is a different character in a neighborhood, a different kind of personality, a different kind of mind, even,” says Moss. “And that’s where I bring in my psychoanalytic self.”
“There is a different mindset in the East Village, the Lower East Side, and a lot of these hyper-gentrified neighborhoods,” explains Moss. “And it comes with money, it comes with a particular relationship to money.”
The last keys to the flophouse rooms still hang behind the front desk, a reminder of the Bowery’s displaced population. “I see these people moving into these neighborhoods, and you feel it, everybody feels it—that attitude of entitlement and dismissiveness,” says Moss. “And that’s really a tragedy. That’s a social disintegration.”
“It’s happening in every city, not just in the United States, but every globalized city around the world,” notes Moss. “Berlin, Paris, Venice, Barcelona—they are all having the same problems: overtourism, hypergentrification, corporatization, inequality.”
Like Yonah Schimmel, McSorley’s Old Ale House is one of the few century-old businesses that still remain in the area. At the right time, when the crowds have not yet arrived, it can offer a respite from the rapid changes happening outside. “11 a.m.—that’s the only time I will go to McSorley’s,” says Moss.
“This is great; it’s so quiet,” says Moss, while enjoying mugs of light ale. “On a holiday weekend in the summer, New York becomes New York again, because all those people leave. And it feels different. The energy is different.”
“Even in the howling crowds, as the city crumbles and dies all around us, now and then, here and there, if we’re paying close attention, we can still find pleasure in the gifts of New York,” Moss writes in Vanishing New York. “It’s just a hell of a lot harder than it used to be.”
Nathan Kensinger is a photographer, filmmaker, and curator who has been documenting New York City's abandoned edges, endangered neighborhoods, and post-industrial waterfront for more than a decade. His Camera Obscura photo essays have appeared on Curbed since 2012. "Industrial Twilight," an exhibit of Kensinger’s photographs of Brooklyn’s changing waterfront, is currently being exhibited at the Atlantic Avenue subway station in Brooklyn.
Jeremiah Moss, creator of the award-winning blog Vanishing New York, is the pen name of Griffin Hansbury. His writing on the city has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and online for The New Yorker and The Paris Review. As Hansbury, he is the author of The Nostalgist, a novel, and works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.
No bio.
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul
Mark Levine
Booklist. 113.22 (Aug. 1, 2017): p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul. By Jeremiah Moss. Aug. 2017.464p. Morrow/Dey St., $28.99 (9780062439697). 974.7.
This is a very good, angrily passionate, and ultimately saddening book. Moss (a pseudonym) is a blogger (the book is an outgrowth of his blog) in love with a city that he mourns, a city that he feels is dissolving in a welter of unthinkable expense (he provides egregious examples) and hypergentrification (even more horrifying). New York, he argues in a brilliantly written and well-informed account, is losing its bohemian flair and often raffish charm. Making this point, he quotes Adam Gopnik, who has compared New York to a former lover who has had a facelift, losing not only her wrinkles but also her character. Although the historical background covered here has been done before, Moss synthesizes it superbly, noting the trends and policies that got the city where it is today. There is plenty of blame to pass around: yuppies, a succession of mayors from Koch to Bloomberg, speculators, bankers, and what Moss calls "neo-liberalism." The book is about displacement, race, and social class, the substitution of elites for "undesirables." His conclusion: "We can still find pleasure in the gifts of New York. It's just a whole lot harder than it used to be." --Mark Levine
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Levine, Mark. "Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 19. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718724/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26a248ef. Accessed 19 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501718724
Moss, Jeremiah: VANISHING NEW YORK
Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Moss, Jeremiah VANISHING NEW YORK Dey Street/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $28.99 7, 25 ISBN: 978-0-06-243969-7
The Big Apple is morphing into a class-war amusement park for the very rich. Thus this irate argument for remaking it into a city for the rest of us.Like climate change, writes pseudonymous New York Daily News editorialist and blogger Moss, hypergentrification is both a fact and a human-caused artifact and, therefore, can be halted. The hypergentrification of New York, in particular, "gentrification on speed, shot up with free-market capitalism," is producing a safe, arid, sterile, uniform city, a place in which the old bohemian mecca has been overwhelmed by "luxury condo towers, rampant greed, and suburbanization." If that seems a touch hyperbolic, then the author is happy to own up to the adjective, noting, derisively, that New York may not be altogether dead, if "dying" is a substitute word that will make his critics happier. Moss traces this process to the urban renewal programs of the New Deal, when tenements were scraped away in the apparent hope that poverty would disappear with them. Robert Moses "flattened neighborhoods where the vast majority of people were working class and nonwhite," while Ed Koch ushered in the "me decade" of the 1980s, Rudy Giuliani swept the streets by force in the '90s, and Michael Bloomberg oversaw the post-9/11 transformation of the city into the province of the very rich in a program that Moss calls "the apotheosis of neoliberal ideology." Happily, the jargon mostly gives way to plainspoken language of anger at the disappearance of places like the old Times Square, where visitors are now "anesthetized in the greasy glow" of fast food and big-screen TVs. The sitting president figures in the tale, too, as a public-funds moocher of the first water. Moss closes with notes on remaking New York so that less moneyed, less well-connected residents enjoy the same "right to the city" as his greedy villains. Maddening if you're not mega-wealthy, and a vigorous, righteously indignant book that would do Jane Jacobs proud.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Moss, Jeremiah: VANISHING NEW YORK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329304/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cdcd2849. Accessed 19 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329304
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul
Publishers Weekly. 264.22 (May 29, 2017): p59+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul
Jeremiah Moss. Dey Street, $28.99 (464p) ISBN 978-0-06-243969-7
In the spirit of Jane Jacobs, Moss, author of the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, makes a passionate case against "the luxury vision of New York that characterized the Bloomberg years." The "hyper-gentrification," as Moss terms it, of the last decade plus has radically transformed New York City. The city is no longer "the unbridled engine of the nation's progressive culture and creativity, sustaining a diversity of people." Instead, Moss sees a soulless realm of "luxury condo towers, rampant greed, and suburbanization." This argument is not a new one, but the book provides an accessible overview of recent efforts to make the Big Apple more appealing to the affluent. Moss is particularly attuned to gentrification's effects on individual neighborhoods and merchants and argues that the changes are not merely the results of the free market but a deliberate class makeover of the city. He illustrates this point through the example of the 2008 rezoning of Harlem led by Bloomberg's city-planning director Amanda Burden, who justified the plans to the New York Times with an anecdote about when she attended a concert at the Apollo Theater and couldn't find a nearby restaurant that appealed to her. Moss also credits pedestrians' addiction to screens as a factor in their indifference to the changing landscape. Whether or not readers share Moss's heartfelt belief that New York City has lost its soul, this polemic is likely to stir a lot of emotions. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 59+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500760/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=86c626e3. Accessed 19 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500760
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul
By Jeremiah Moss
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, by Jeremiah Moss. Dey St., 465 pages, $28.99.
February 7, 2018
Anna Shapiro
KEYWORDS book review
Reprints
?2
No Comments
You don’t have to live in New York to find that a cookie-cutter nail salon has replaced a treasured longtime lunch spot, or plate glass storefronts have been papered to conceal suddenly empty interiors. Today, in this city and others as different as San Francisco and London, you walk down a familiar street, and, increasingly, there is nothing familiar. Moss’s book will tell you that this affects residents as “root shock,” a form of traumatic stress brought on when your world vanishes.
But the author’s purpose in broadening his influential blog, “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York,” into a book is, on the one hand, to detail key institutions and neighborhoods that have been wiped out, and, on the other, to pinpoint why this has been happening on the obliterating scale and at the accelerated pace of recent decades. Crucially, he combats two myths: one, that the myriad and gargantuan shifts are no more than the norm of a restless city, and, two, that these overhauls are just the result of market forces.
Moss targets as a primary culprit the 1929 Regional Plan Association’s prescription for the city—investment in finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) and dropping the manufacturing that supports a working class—in making it a place for the wealthy and only the hautest of the haute bourgeoisie. Major mechanisms of this astonishingly successful scheme to favor FIRE ventures have been hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks (itemized throughout the book) and eminent domain declared to make way for luxury housing, along with the elimination of rent controls for small businesses. Moss refers to this as hypergentrification—not what happens when artists move into a low-rent area but when real-estate interests do. This process causes the diminution of layering and variation that is the essence of a city, physically and culturally, reducing the economic benefits of cross-fertilization between classes and professions, and the inspirations that arise from quirks in the built environment.
Two elements absent from Moss’s lamentation are a longer historical view and making the force of national politics part of the account. The New York of 2018 is much like the New York of 1918, when local plutocrats largely captured city control—not to mention national in the giveaways of rail rights and legislation favorable to interstate corporations, then illegal, that they wished to expand. It is not entirely surprising that we would see a reprise of political values that celebrate the rich and say to the poor that their suffering is their own fault.
To end his book, Moss provides a well-thought-out wish list: for the boards that merely register community opinion to have an actual mandate regarding development in their district; controls on the spread of chain businesses; restoration of commercial-rent regulation; protection of legacy businesses through landmarking (San Francisco’s doing it); limiting the right of landlords to claim losses on commercial vacancies (as London has); rerouting incentives to create affordable housing without luxury units (L.A. is working on it); a tax on pieds-à-terre (see London); reducing and controlling tourism (Amsterdam, Venice, and Barcelona are on it); tightening eminent domain. Amen.
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul
Image of Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul
Author(s):
Jeremiah Moss
Release Date:
July 24, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Dey Street Books
Pages:
480
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Basil Smilke Jr.
The urban doughnut, in planning parlance, has inverted. The once dense, decaying city surrounded by wealthy tree-lined suburbs is still thick with residents and tourists (perhaps more so than ever) but has given way to peripheral pockets of poverty with increasing income and racial diversity, encircling prosperous urban centers experiencing record low crime, concentrations of high-skilled high-income earners and rapid development.
This new wave of gentrification, scholars suggest, could be motivated by a desire for shorter commute times or high-end amenities. Mayors and governors charged with balancing budgets and generating a tax base cannot ignore the benefits of revitalized business districts and a growing investment class.
In the case of New York City, many long-term residents decry the evolution, arguing against the disruption of the city’s rich multiplex of friends and strangers, families and neighbors who gave New York its inimitable texture. Urbanist, activist, and author Jane Jacobs said of cities, “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”
Jacobs is the muse inspiring Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, a relevant lamentation of New York’s rebellious, nonconformist past and its path toward an inexpressive mélange of glass and steel big box stores and chain restaurants. Each chapter delivers an obituary of the neighborhoods and boroughs that were worlds unto themselves brimming with cultural diversity. Iconoclast Gotham is gone and “neoliberal policy” has become “a toxic plague on New York’s soul.”
Vanishing’s first chapter is dedicated to the East Village where Ukrainians and Puerto Ricans, among others, shared sidewalks, but according to performance artist Penny Arcade, “[t]he ten most popular kids from every high school in the world are now living in New York City. Those are the people who most of us who came to New York came here to get away from.”
Lower Manhattan is now a collection of major chains like the Gap replete with ostentatious architecture not befitting the neighborhood’s character. Here and throughout the text, long-time businesses pay the price for the city’s progress. The famed Second Avenue Deli for example, was ordered to close after 52 years after a substantial increase in rent—a recurring theme throughout the book.
Modern gentrification in New York started in the 1970s and was initially sporadic and somewhat isolated. But today, the city is experiencing hyper-gentrification originating in the post 70s fiscal austerity that jolted city and state leaders into luring developers, tourists, and high-skilled high-income professionals that supported a stronger tax base.
After four waves of progressively pervasive changes in neighborhoods across the five boroughs, the “aggressive” and “frenetic” pace of development into the 2000s leads Moss to conclude that hyper-gentrification has firmly taken hold.
Before delving too deeply into his discussion, Moss provides a brief history of discriminatory policies dating back to the 1930s that kept populations segregated, unequal, and devoid of substantial financial investment. Robert Moses, the urban planner who had “deep disdain for common people” added physical decimation to already economically troubled neighborhoods, reshaping New York City profoundly and permanently. He plowed through homes and neighborhoods to build expressways, parks and cultural institutions targeted to wealthier residents and visitors.
Urban unrest, crime and fiscal woes prompted white flight that paralleled nationalized white backlash to the Civil Rights Act fanned by George Wallace’s manipulation of white working-class Americans against immigrants and urban centers. White ethnics in New York may have commiserated with these voters across the country but soon found themselves to be victimized and displaced by urban renewal schemes back home.
In the 1990s, Giuliani’s quality of life strategies and draconian zero-tolerance policing drove New York City’s residents apart. Post-September 11th rebuilding and rebranding unsettled and already fractured city that Bloomberg, as the author suggests, marshaled with disastrous effect.
Our new New York is loaded with economic contrasts: The High Line, high-end shopping in the Meatpacking district exists alongside “poor doors” for low income residents in majority market-based apartment buildings and rapidly growing homeless populations. To Moss, something seems obscene about the spectacle and the eventual suburbanization of the city—a travesty even the center-right New York Post called “New York-style financial apartheid.”
Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Harlem, and East Harlem may be the most poignant examples where loss of population coincides with the outward flow of local musicians, artists, and the cultural institutions they created decades ago. In fact, a New York Times story in 2016 entitled “The End of Black Harlem” makes the case: “Rents are rising; historic buildings are coming down. The Renaissance, where Duke Ellington performed, and the Childs Memorial Temple Church of God in Christ, where Malcolm X’s funeral was held, have all been demolished. Night life fixtures like Smalls’ Paradise and Lenox Lounge are gone.”
Few will truly understand how the narratives in Vanishing New York cut to the core of how New Yorkers live and interact, though the theme likely resonates in cities big and small across the country. Moss leaves us with twelve recommendations for activists. Among them, he wants to empower community boards—grassroots neighborhood-based governmental units—by awarding local residents decision-making ability over development, control of the spread of chain businesses, protection of small businesses, expansion of landmarking, and imposition of a vacancy tax on landlords who create high-rent blight.
We often forget that the good ol’ days were pretty bad in many ways. But the book does a good job of highlighting a global Enron-styled return to the Gilded Age that thrives on excess. For politicos, the subtext reveals a requiem for the loss of liberalism. In a city with a 6-1 Democratic-to-Republican registration, voters chose 20 years of non-Democratic mayors in Giuliani and Bloomberg. But Vanishing New York isn’t looking for a liberal hero so much as it just wants its city back—complete with all its wrinkles and warts.
Basil Smikle, Jr. is executive director of the New York State Democratic Party. He is also President of the consultancy, Basil Smikle Associates. A frequent commentator on both local and national media, he holds adjunct appointments at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the City University of New York’s School of Professional Studies.