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Here’s
an old story: Your favorite dive bar/record shop/little Cuban
restaurant gets turned into a Citibank/Apple store/luxury condominium.
You pass through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, then inevitably
settle into acceptance.
For nearly a decade, Jeremiah Moss has been telling that story on his brilliantly dismal blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York,
a digital obituary column for the various mom-and-pop concerns that
have fallen prey to the city’s endless search for higher rents. A
wistful man with a vulture’s eye for carrion, Mr. Moss has dedicated
years to recording the demise of famous institutions like the Roseland Ballroom
in Manhattan, which will soon become a high-rise building, and
unfamiliar treasures like Family Jewels, a clothing store in Chelsea,
which is scheduled to close at the end of April.
But
then something happened last fall. Mr. Moss, which is not his real name
— more on that to come — took part in a doomed attempt to save the Café Edison,
a beloved Times Square coffee shop whose landlord was looking to
replace it with a classier establishment. When the effort failed, it
left Mr. Moss radicalized. Deciding it was time to devote himself to
effecting change, not just to chronicling its ravages, Mr. Moss embarked
on a quest to rescue the rest of New York’s small businesses through a
media campaign organized beneath the rubric #SaveNYC.
“What’s
happening in the city now isn’t gentrification — it’s
hyper-gentrification,” he said one day last month, brooding over coffee
in a gentrified diner in the gentrified East Village, where he has
resided, begrudgingly of late, for more than 20 years. “New York has
traditionally changed organically: Italians move out, Chinese move in.
But this is not organic. This is planned, it’s strategic. It’s the city
government and major corporations colluding together to recreate the
landscape.”
Mr.
Moss is a consummate complainer, and when he talks about collusion, he
is usually referring to decisions by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former
mayor (whom he hates), to hand out tax credits to real-estate developers
(he hates them, too) or to offer easements to national chains like
Whole Foods (which he also hates). He launched his effort in December
with a pugnacious Facebook page
that sought ideas on how to roll back Mr. Bloomberg’s policies and thus
achieve his ultimate goal of saving “the soul of New York City.”
By early February, Mr. Moss had created a website, Savenyc.nyc,
on which citizen activists have been posting pictures of the closed or
threatened businesses in their own neighborhoods. Then came a Twitter feed, which he has used himself to announce events and to needle politicians (“@BilldeBlasio What are you doing to #SaveNYC?”).
But
for someone who has launched a political campaign largely based on
garnering publicity, Mr. Moss has taken great pains to protect his real
identity. He is frugal with the details of his life, saying only that he
is in his 40s and comes from Massachusetts. Like other anonymous
crusaders — Batman, say, or Banksy — he claims he feels most comfortable
acting under an alias: one that in his case blends a penchant for
apocalyptic bombast with the crustiness of a curmudgeon.
A therapist and a writer, he says he is worried that clients might object to his activism.
“I
also found that a pen name enables me to write with a freedom I don’t
otherwise have,” he wrote in an email. “I mean a psychological or
emotional freedom. I am less constricted.”
Today’s
New York certainly offers ample opportunities for outrage, and Mr.
Moss, who is easily incensed, has ranted in the past about subjects as
diverse as Applebee’s, the High Line
and Taylor Swift’s ascent as the city’s tourist spokeswoman. But with
#SaveNYC, he is trying to move beyond his own indignation to channel
public anger into a platform.
“One
thing I learned from working on the Edison,” he said, “is that lots of
people are angry, lots are complaining — they’re just not sure what to
do. They don’t know that there are real solutions already out there.”
Among those solutions, Mr. Moss maintains, is the Small Business Jobs Survival Act,
which was first introduced in the City Council in 1986 and is intended
to provide commercial tenants with the legal means to negotiate rent
disputes with landlords. While the bill was re-sponsored last year by
Councilwoman Annabel Palma, a Democrat from the Bronx, and has the support of politicians like Gale A. Brewer,
the Manhattan Borough president, who is also a Democrat, the
real-estate industry opposes it. Nonetheless, Mr. Moss argues that by
gathering an army of complainers — “A crowd is loud,” he said — he can
get it passed as part of his broader agenda: to cap the number of chain
stores in the city, to fine landlords who leave their storefronts empty
and to create a special landmarks program that would seek suggestions
from communities to preserve important cultural institutions, not just
the buildings that surround them.
This
essentially conservative approach to urban land management has drawn
criticism from those who find Mr. Moss’s distaste for change elitist and
counterproductive. Last month, The New York Observer wrote an
unflattering article about him that employed the phrase “The Tyranny of Nostalgia.” Other publications, like The Economist, have argued that restrictive zoning laws constrain information-based economies in cities like New York.
But drawing on the work of the Marxist geographer Neil Smith,
Mr. Moss has advanced a theory that today’s pervasive gentrification
started in the 1990s as a revanchist assault on crime, disorder and
general funkiness by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican. The
terrorist attack of Sept. 11 deepened the city’s psychic need for
security and comfort, Mr. Moss said, and by the time Mr. Bloomberg came
to power in 2002, many residents were responsive to his vision of New
York as a corporatized citadel of luxury and money.
That vision has persisted, Mr. Moss contends, despite the arrival of Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat. Just a few months ago, the Center for an Urban Future issued a study announcing that Manhattan alone now has more than 2,800 chain stores,
a 10 percent increase since 2009. Over roughly the same period, the
city has been flooded by a transformative tide of international capital,
much of which has flowed into the upper reaches of the real estate
market, crowding out affordable housing, Mr. Moss has argued, and
leading to a general rise in rents.
While
Mr. Moss has focused most of his tactical attention on city officials
and real estate developers, his personal ire is frequently directed at
what he calls Yunnies, or young urban narcissists. Yunnies are, by his
account, the silent accomplices of hyper-gentrification: de-cultured
millennials who actively like to shop at Target and could not care less
if a quirky shrine like Bill’s Gay Nineties,
which is the tavern where Tallulah Bankhead used to drink and which
closed three years ago, is turned into a garish, high-end restaurant.
“People
used to come here from their miserable lives in the suburbs to be
queers, artists, oddballs,” Mr. Moss said, waving off the waitress’s
offer of another splash of coffee. “But now we have this wave of young
people coming in with their cellphones and their culture of bland,
Middle American safety. If that’s what you want, why bother coming here
at all? It’s like they brought the suburbs with them.”
Mr.
Moss, it should be noted, also comes from the suburbs — even if he does
not want to reveal which one. He insists, however, that his anger and
his activism set him apart.
“I’m
pretty cranky, but I also love the city,” he said. “I want it to be the
best it can be, and I just don’t think that its best is a bunch of
Olive Gardens, Starbucks and billion-dollar towers full of no one.”
By
this point he had finished both his coffee and his complaining and
stood to leave in his pageboy cap and pea coat. But before he walked
away, he turned to add: “That would just be sad. We should all be
incredibly cranky about that.”
Correction: April 4, 2015
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the status of Bonelle, a pastry shop in Forest Hills, Queens. A Dunkin’ Donuts opened on the same block but did not replace Bonelle. The shops coexist.
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the status of Bonelle, a pastry shop in Forest Hills, Queens. A Dunkin’ Donuts opened on the same block but did not replace Bonelle. The shops coexist.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on April 5, 2015, on pa
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