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On a gray, drizzly Friday in July, I joined Jeremiah Moss for a walk. We met at the Astor Place cube, as the artist Tony Rosenthal’s 1967 black Cor-Ten steel sculpture Alamo is known, in the shadow of two buildings that exemplify everything Moss hates about contemporary New York. To the south stood the awkwardly amoebic Astor Place Tower; looming behind us, the gleaming black glass of 51 Astor Place, a/k/a the Death Star. If real estate money had its way, this neighborhood — gateway to the once irresistibly gritty East Village — would be rebranded “Midtown South.”
In his new book, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul (Dey Street), Moss offers a wrenching, exhaustive chronicle of the “hyper-gentrification” of New York — and the relentless monotony of chain stores and luxury high-rises that continues to suffocate small businesses and displace the poor, working-class, immigrant, and ethnic communities and artists, eccentrics, and bohemians who have made the city what it is. 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 an unequivocally depressing read.
full: https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/07/18/jeremiah-moss-was-here-vanishing-new-york/
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