05/29/2017
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)

Essential reading for fans of Jane Jacobs, Joseph Mitchell, Patti Smith, Luc Sante, and cheap pierogi.” — David Kamp, Vanity Fair

“A full-throated lament for the city’s bygone charms.” — Wall Street Journal

“We should all buy Jeremiah Moss’s book, Vanishing New York.” — Sarah Jessica Parker 

“I haven’t read a more impassioned book in over a decade. Vanishing New York is angry, incredulous, but also full of insight into a city of legend, where every legend happened to be true.” — Gary Shteyngart

“Jeremiah Moss came to the party that is New York City just in time to see it turn into a wake.His book is lucid, eloquent, phenomenally detailed, and terribly sad. Future generations, assuming there are any, will read it in wonder and disbelief.” — Luc Sante

“Meticulously researched, thoroughly reported, at once a call to arms and a soul cry, Vanishing New York is a love letter to originality and the human spirit. Grab a knish and settle in.” — Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Alice and Oliver

“A vigorous, righteously indignant book that would do Jane Jacobs proud.” — Kirkus

“One of the most thorough and pugnacious chroniclers of New York’s blandification.” — The Atlantic

“A vigorous, righteously indignant book that would do Jane Jacobs proud.” — Kirkus Reviews

“A very good, angrily passionate, and ultimately saddening book [. . . ] brilliantly written and well-informed.” — Booklist

“For those of us who’ve watched hopelessly as our beautiful city has turned into an assortment of Duane Reades and Starbucks, this book is a must-read. Jeremiah Moss bears witness on our behalf, and puts it all into brilliant perspective.” — Andy Cohen, host and executive producer, “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”

“A wrenching, exhaustive chronicle of the ‘hypergentrification of New York’ [. . .] Every page is charged with Moss’s deep love of New York. It is both a vital and unequivocally depressing read.” — The Village Voice

“Wrathful howl.” — Harper’s Magazine

One of the most thorough and pugnacious chroniclers of New York’s blandification.

A full-throated lament for the city’s bygone charms.

I haven’t read a more impassioned book in over a decade. Vanishing New York is angry, incredulous, but also full of insight into a city of legend, where every legend happened to be true.

Essential reading for fans of Jane Jacobs, Joseph Mitchell, Patti Smith, Luc Sante, and cheap pierogi.

Jeremiah Moss came to the party that is New York City just in time to see it turn into a wake.His book is lucid, eloquent, phenomenally detailed, and terribly sad. Future generations, assuming there are any, will read it in wonder and disbelief.

We should all buy Jeremiah Moss’s book, Vanishing New York.

Meticulously researched, thoroughly reported, at once a call to arms and a soul cry, Vanishing New York is a love letter to originality and the human spirit. Grab a knish and settle in.

A very good, angrily passionate, and ultimately saddening book [. . . ] brilliantly written and well-informed.

A wrenching, exhaustive chronicle of the ‘hypergentrification of New York’ [. . .] Every page is charged with Moss’s deep love of New York. It is both a vital and unequivocally depressing read.

Wrathful howl.

For those of us who’ve watched hopelessly as our beautiful city has turned into an assortment of Duane Reades and Starbucks, this book is a must-read. Jeremiah Moss bears witness on our behalf, and puts it all into brilliant perspective.

A full-throated lament for the city’s bygone charms.

A very good, angrily passionate, and ultimately saddening book [. . . ] brilliantly written and well-informed.

"[A] comprehensive, emotional exploration of the historical, economic and social forces that have permitted and in many cases encouraged things to play out so dismally." —New York Times

We should all buy Jeremiah Moss’s book, Vanishing New York.

Wrathful howl.

07/01/2017
In his first book, blogger Moss (vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com) explicitly states his bias toward the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan. He says at the outset that he doesn't consider the other parts of New York to be real, setting up his own classism and making readers perceive the inclusion of Harlem (and the South Bronx) to be tokenism at worst. Gentrification cannot easily be covered in its entirety, even within the borders of the five boroughs (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island) and focusing on his favorite neighborhoods could have worked if Moss had better contextualized them. The author effectively distills the histories of neighborhoods he knows well, particularly those of lower Manhattan, and he explains some of the more recent shifting class conflicts. Yet, he does not include people impacted by hypergentrification, who live in "not New York," places such as the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. His research is lightweight and, unfortunately, he quotes from other news stories instead of speaking directly to residents of the neighborhoods covered. VERDICT Point patrons to WNYC's eight-part radio series about gentrification in Brooklyn instead.—Candice Kail, Columbia Univ. Libs., New York

2017-05-15
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.