The Pen Behind Jeremiah Moss (Vanishing New York) + 27 Cooper Square Dedication

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For a decade, a blogger writing under the nom de plume Jeremiah Moss has been chronicling the Bloomberg and post-Bloomberg era gentrification--hypergentrification--of New York City, primarily through posts that tally the disappearance of countless small and medium-sized, often longstanding businesses. While not always avoiding nostalgia and though he has mostly focused on Manhattan, Moss's blog, Vanishing New York, has set the standard in consistently demonstrating city and state policies favoring plutocratic real estate interests, in combination with the national and global neoliberal economic system, have had a devastating effect on so much of the city's social ecology, its distinctive neighborhoods, and its diverse cultural vibrancy, let alone affordability, all of which have drawn creative people in particular to New York for more than a century.

Though gentrification in New York is hardly new, Moss has detailed how over the last 10 years, particularly in the lead-up to and through the Great Recession, whole sections--and increasingly boroughs--of New York have transformed into hollowed out museums of themselves. (Lost City was another blog that contemporaneously recorded the loss of many New York landmarks, from 2006 through 2014. Gothamist also provides updates amidst its general news about the city.) Among the terms I've learned from Moss's blog are yunny (young urban narcissists), zombie urbanism, and hypergentrification, to name just a few.  From my first encounter with Moss's lamentations--appropriately enough, an early entry from 2007 bore that title--and jeremiads, I became a fan, finding in his posts arguments that compellingly articulated what I saw happening as far back as the period right after 9/11, in 2001, and also underway simultaneously and without explanation, in Chicago.

From Jeremiah's
Vanishing New York

Certainly many have written persuasively about gentrification and its effects, and we can always use more informed takes. But Moss has also urged readers to go beyond mourning and support the pro-small business, cultural landmarking, anti-chain approach of SAVE NYC. Moss also has tried to address readers' questions, including why he began the blog, whether gentrification is (ever) good for working-class and poor people, how Bloomberg's tenure really affected New York (for the worse), and how New York City has become increasingly suburbanized, or a dense, vertical simulacrum of the suburban--an elite suburb, that is. Notably, he also has not shied away from addressing questions of race, class, and political access, among other topics key to the problem of hypergentrification.

For his efforts he has received a great deal of press, and some awards. Until now, Moss has not compiled his thoughts in book form, but that is set to change with Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul (HarperCollins), which will hit bookshelves shortly. A book party is set for July 27, in SoHo.

What also has remained unknown to most readers of Moss's blog is who the writer really is. (In fact I have to admit I was quite willing not to have his real identity revealed.) Recently, however, in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" piece by Michael Schulman, Moss does share with the world who he really is: Griffin Hansbury, a transgender psychoanalyst, social worker, and aspiring novelist who has lived in New York for more than a quarter of a century. He lives in the East Village, and has shifted, as Schulman points out, from elegist to activist, when he rallied readers behind the attempt to save Midtown's Café Edison, which did not succeed but which fed into the #SAVENYC campaign.
So why did Moss (Hansbury) unmask himself?

[He] decided to reveal himself, he said, so he can show up at his own rallies and on panels. Also, “Vanishing New York” is now a book. Walking down St. Mark’s Place, past a dark-glass building that he called the Death Star, he mentioned a study that measured pedestrians’ skin conductivity outside a sleek Whole Foods and on a more diversified street. “They found that blocks that are all this glass stuff actually shorten the lives of senior citizens, because they’re so depressing,” he said.

And, as I can attest, they can turn into giant magnifying glasses, scorching the ground around them. I hope to share this and other thoughts--like the increasingly disturbing lack of adequate infrastructure in New York and New Jersey, especially to handle all of the building, new arrivals, or catastrophic contingencies like a worse version of the 2003 blackout (which I experienced firsthand) or another tropical storm as strong as or stronger than 2012's Hurricane Sandy-- in person with him, at his book event or another, but either way, I'll be picking up a copy of Vanishing New York, the book version, while continuing to read his blog.

***

A few days ago, another New York City blog I regularly browse, EV Grieve, posted about a plaque dedication at 27 Cooper Square on June 21. Though increasing swaths of Manhattan and New York City have been or are being leveled or built over in favor of the kinds of cookie-cutter designer glass luxury towers that Moss has decried on his blog, 27 Cooper Square managed to survive the wrecking ball, mainly because, as EV Grieve points out, two of the building's resident, including acclaimed poet and memoirist Hettie Jones, balked at moving out so that the Cooper Square Hotel could be built next door. Jones and her fellow tenant had secured artist loft status in the 1980s, and thus had the law on their side. Now, as the luxe Cooper Square Hotel looms beside them and an increasingly hypergentrified Downtown New York surrounds them, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP), in partnership with Two Boots Foundation, will commemorate 27 Cooper Square's importance as a cultural node during the 1960s.

The 1845 building, as the plaque announces, was the home of several key artistic figures during the 1960s. Quoting EV Grieve (and the email the site received from GVSHP):

In the 1960s, this 1845 former rooming house became a laboratory for artistic, literary and political currents. Writers LeRoi [later Amiri Baraka] and Hettie Jones, their Yugen magazine and Totem Press, musician Archie Shepp and painter Elizabeth Murray all had homes here. The vacant building was transformed into a vital hub of cultural life, attracting leading figures including those from the Beats and the world of jazz. It was also the childhood home of a second generation of East Village artists and thinkers.

GVSHP and Two Boots Foundation will install a plaque on the building at 27 Cooper Square to mark the significance of the site in the artistic legacy of the East Village.

The event's slated speakers included Archie Shepp's son Accra Shepp, a noted photographer, and Hettie Jones, as well as a representative of the GVSHP, and poet and Bowery Poetry Club co-founder Bob Holman. You can watch a video of the dedication on YouTube, and see photos on Flickr. Though cultural producers still live in the area, as Jones pointed out in the 2008 New York Times article on her successful battle against the Cooper Square Hotel, "This used to be an area where people got their start. Now it’s a place to land once you’ve made it." And it's only more so these days, but the plaque will remind people, at least those who stop and read it, that the area was once more, much more, than a hub of global lucre.

Jeremiah Moss's #SaveNYC

One of my regular blog reads is New Yorker Jeremiah Moss's Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. Since 2007 through today he has relentlessly chronicled the changes to the city's social, political and economic ecology, noting the disappearance of longtime businesses, the increasing waves of hypergentrification, and the homogenized cityscape that has resulted. While it's true that gentrification in New York is hardly new, or that the city has never been static, the pace of the changes (towers rising, small businesses vanishing) has become dizzying, as Moss shows again and again. Also, while too much nostalgia dissolves in sentimentality and the blame for the city's changes lies at no one doorstep, it is nevertheless important to document, as Moss does, how the absence of laws or a system to counter the pro-elite zoning that began under former mayor Rudy Giuliani and accelerated into hyperdrive under billionaire plutocrat Michael Bloomberg, has deleterious effects on many aspects of what people think of as New York (distinctive, economically diverse neighborhoods, particular sub-cultures, and so forth). When every neighborhood in Manhattan increasingly becomes a combo high-end condo district coupled with luxury outdoor mall, what kind of city remains?

Moss has decided to launch a project, with a website, entitled #SaveNYC. As he says on the website:

#SaveNYC is a grassroots, crowd-sourced, DIY movement to protect and preserve the diversity and uniqueness of the urban fabric in New York City. As our vibrant streetscapes and neighborhoods are turned into bland, suburban-style shopping malls, filled with chain stores and glossy luxury retail, #SaveNYC is fighting for small businesses and cultural institutions to remain in place. Our mission is to bring attention to the plight of Mom and Pop, and to lobby state and city government to implement significant and powerful protections for small businesses and cultural institutions across the five boroughs of New York City. The devastation has been overwhelming. Protecting what remains will require a multi-pronged approach. 

The projects first steps including raising awareness by collecting video and photographic testimonials from people everywhere who love New York and want to see its diverse culture and heritage protected. One component involves using social media, via the hashtag #SaveNYC, and a concomitant Facebook group. On the political front, Moss is pushing to pass the Small Business Jobs Survival Act (0402-2014), which he says "will make it possible for small businesses to negotiate fair lease renewals with landlords, thus stemming the tide of mass evictions and catastrophic rent hikes." Currently, landlords' ability to hike up rents, by doubling or tripling the going rate, has meant that businesses that had survived for decades or even a century have been shoved out in favor of chains.

Of course anyone paying attention to the asset-based economic logic of Wall Street, whose power and goals fuel these changes, will grasp what's happening here, as there's always more money to be made by expanding private and publicly traded corporations than in an environment in which there are lots of small businesses and well-rewarded labor. Money, for a very few people, is all Wall Street cares about. Another issue is the rising cost of real estate, and laws that favor certain kinds of elite and corporate investors and spur appreciation, to the disadvantage of the vast majority of renters and homeowners. Although New York mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned on behalf of the city's majority, his actions to save small businesses have been not matched the rhetoric, nor have those of the City Council. Meanwhile, chain stores, businesses like bespoke barbershops, frou-frou restaurants and spinning (not of yarn but weight-focused wealthy people) proliferate.

I urge J's Theater readers to explore Jeremiah's main site, linked above, and #SaveNYC. If you're a New Yorker, you can:

Pass the Small Business Jobs Survival Act (SBJSA) to create fair negotiations of commercial lease renewals, so landlords can’t use insane rent hikes to evict dependable and beloved business people.

• Sign the petition for the SBJSA here
• Read more about the bill here
• Click here to find your local council members — call and write, tell them to pass this bill now
• Tweet your local council member, @NYCCouncil, and @MMViverito as often as possible and tell them to pass the SBJSA

Jeremiah outlines other steps as well for those in NYC. Even if you don't live in the city, you can add a video or a photo showing your support for Jeremiah's initiative and offering visual support on behalf of the New York that is being subsumed by a shiny, super-expensive new and increasingly dull version. The more Mayor de Blasio and the New York City Council hear from New Yorkers and those who participate in this initiative, the more likely the SBJSA, as well as other approaches, like emails and daily tweets to public officials to control the spread of chains (as has been done in San Francisco), taking away the over-generous tax breaks for megacorporations and aid small businesses; and penalize landlords to maintain empty storefronts to gain the highest commercial rents possible (i.e., from chains or luxury boutiques).

One need only look at the evisceration of the West Village's 8th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, once Bookstore and later Shoe Row, but which is now a dull, depopulated street dotted with a few high-end restaurants and boutiques, a fancy hotel, and empty storefronts, that could be anywhere, to see the direction things are going. Now I need to post a photo, since I'm not so adept at making and editing personal videos!

"Lunch Hour NYC" Exhibit @ NYPL

Depression era sign, Lunch Hour NYC (NYPL.org)

I spend at least one or two days of almost every week at the New York Public Library's Research Branch (the Schwarzman Building, soon to undergo a monstrous transformation), but so narrow and routine are my tracks there that it took a post on Jeremiah's Vanishing New York to draw me to the "Lunch Hour NYC" exhibit on the library's first floor. It is a delight, and if you're in Manhattan and anywhere near 42nd St. and Bryant Park, devote a half hour to seeing it. The gist of the exhibit is that in many ways New York City differs from the rest of the country, but in terms of lunch, a word whose definition the exhibit accords its own display, New York has often been very distinctive, as well as a pacesetter for the rest of the USA. From oyster carts and pretzel venders, to bagel-brimming delicatessens, to the Horn and Hardart automats that gladdened not only numerous city dwellers' stomachs but Hollywood screenwriters' imaginations as they dreamt up scenarios and settings, to that American culinary staple, peanut butter, as a lunchtime nutritional staple, to sumptuous power lunches where the city's (and often the country's and globe's) most important people made sure to be seen, the exhibit casts a wide net and offers many pearls.

All about peanut butter for lunch (NYPL.org)

Fr. Divine, immortalized by Ralph Ellison (NYPL.org)

Lunch, it turns out, first appears in 16th century English as a rendering of the Spanish lonja, meaning a slice of ham (from the Oxford English Dictionary: R. Percyvall Bibliotheca Hispanica Dict. at Lonja de tocino,  A lunch of bacon, frustum, lardi.), while its supposed derivative, luncheon, appeared a decade or more before, with the same meaning. As the meal following breakfast, lunch, the more popular term, was considered "a vulgarism or a fashionable affectation," in the early 19th century (from the Oxford English Dictionary: H. D. Best Personal & Lit. Mem. 307
The word lunch is adopted in that ‘glass of fashion’, Almacks, and luncheon is avoided as unsuitable to the polished society there exhibited), and still in its salad days if salads hardly made any menus but those of the penniless, but by the end of the century it had gained currency and become the name of the midday meal all English-speakers know today.

The automat case handle (NYPL.org)

The automat case (NYPL.org)

Opening one of the doors, with free
recipes inside (NYPL.org)

There's a little section devoted to the Algonquin Hotel and its legendary "round table," with drawings and photographs of notable attendees, including Alexander Woollacott and Dorothy Parker. There is a section devoted to African American lunchers, with an immense reproduction of a cafeteria packed with black diners. I grew up hearing "Why don't you go sell an apple?" as a snide remark, and the exhibit includes materials, like the poster above, detailing how this was for the most destitute of the destitute in the city (and others), at least temporarily, an employment option. Another wall features archival material and historical documents on dieting, which gained in popularity in the post-World War II era. Not only New York-based magazines, especially those geared towards women, but some restaurants attempted to capitalize on the growing interest in growing thinner and more svelte. At the exhibit's end perch artists' books, which show how great a subject lunch food can be in the right creative hands. Across from it, a multi-screen wall flashes images recent lunch-takers in the city, capturing and underlining the diversity and commonalities that have marked New York mid-day dining habits for nearly two centuries. The exhibit is one of the few free (visual, tactile, intellectual) lunches you can get in New York, and you won't gain a pound enjoying it.

A menu from 1954, I believe (NYPL.org)

Ladies who lunch, in 2012 (NYPL.org)

Vanishing New York, or Doma (No) More

Doma, back in April 2007

I'm a regular reader of Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, a blog devoted to cataloguing the rapidly disappearing vestiges of pre-Bloomberg Manhattan (and to a lesser extent, Brooklyn and the other boroughs), be they restaurants, barbers' schools, bodegas, gay leather bars, you name it, be they 10 or 100 years old. One can rightly argue that Manhattan is always changing and has been for over three and a half centuries, but what Jeremiah Moss captures, much as I've observed in my much less attentive way, in his sometimes overly nostalgic and sentimental but always informative posts is that the pace of transformation from the post-9/11 moment to today, driven mainly by hypergentrification, the accelerating colonization of neighborhoods by chain stores, and the vicious cycle and unaffordable rents, except by the superrich and mega-corporations, outstrips the pace of change of the previous ten years.

Even the behemoth NYU, which has rescrambled its neighborhood more than once, couldn't clear out and knock down and throw up buildings as quickly during the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, as it has done over the past decade. (It also has managed to come back from ICU status to now somehow hosting campuses not just in Manhattan and Brooklyn--where it snapped up not just its former engineering and architecture departments, which Polytechnic University of Brooklyn had taken over, during its troubled period thirty-something years ago, but that entire institution!--but in Abu Dhabi and, if I read correctly, in Shanghai, China very soon.) No matter how sharply pitched the outrage by neighborhood residents, the faculty, and politicians, NYU, like New York's bossy imperial mayor and its still growing cadre of billionaires and multimillionaires, is getting its way.

But my point with this post was not to launch into a tirade against my (one of them) alma mater. If you Google "NYU village plan outrage" or a similar combination you will find more than enough material to decide on the appropriate emotion. (Or just let Fran Lebowitz [cf. below] do it for you.) I also suggest visiting Jeremiah's site, which often points to places you might want to drop by in order to catch them before another high-end condo building crams itself into the spot they once occupied, or learn about a planned action to save a struggling bookstore, or chase down links to peruse if the mention of the words "hipster" and "artisanal" and "luxury" and "Ivy League" in the same sentence sparks in any emotion in you. Or if you just want to witness other people's exasperation at entitlement and privilege and no care for the swift, capitalist erasure of the past and present.

Doma, on March 22, 2012

I began this post to memorialize a spot that Jeremiah did not cover, a café-wine bar that was close to my heart, Doma, because, as he wrote to me in a polite email reply, others had covered it. What was Doma and why was it special to me? It was a tiny café that sat at the corner of 7th Avenue, Waverly Place and Perry Streets, in Greenwich Village. It was quite affordable as New York spots go, had decent coffee, slightly better pastries, very good aguas frescas, economical wine (though I rarely drank there), and, at least for a while, a very relaxed atmosphere that encouraged creativity. (The Czech name, Doma, means "home" or "at home," and it certainly had a Bohemian air.) It was a neighborhood-centric joint, with a revolving monthly gallery, that also drew people from all over the metro area, and among the regulars (including an elderly artist who drew extraordinarily elaborate pencil and ink abstractions, or local graduate students, or people working on hieroglyphic math problems--professors? post-docs?), there would be the occasional glamorous or semi-glamorous person (Calvin Klein, Elizabeth Wurtzel, John Cameron Mitchell--I saw all of them, so not just making this bit up) sliding in and out without much to-do.  One cool element of the place was that they had a bookshelf of all the books written or revised within Doma over the years, and it was quite a little library. The café-restaurant, which opened in 2002, stayed fairly relaxed up through about 2007, I think, and then, as the pace of gentrification ticked faster, it glitzed up a bit, becoming a bit more bistro-esque after 6. But during the day it still retained, to the extent possible, what it had been. I also think musicians played there, but I never caught a performance, since those usually happened after my clearing-out time.

It was also the place where I wrote, discussed and revised a good deal of Seismosis during the summers of 2003 to 2006 with my fellow collaborator, Chris Stackhouse. Since it was convenient for both of us to get to, I'd often go there, sketch a bit, work on revisions I'd drafted initially at home, and then show and discuss them with him. He often had to get back to Brooklyn or head somewhere else, so after our discussions I would just chill, write a little more, grit my teeth and not complain because the place did not have Wifi (though if you sat close to the front windows, you could pick up a free connection from time to time), and Doma was also not far from the Village Copier, on Hudson Street, where I copied and bound not only the many drafts of that book, but other many short stories, novel chapters, poems, and so on, over the years. (It too is gone, and its storefront remains empty, occasionally filling with sets for photoshoots.)  Even though Doma was changing--though the other café where I worked on Seismosis, Il Panino Giusto, just down Perry and up Hudson, is thankfully still open--and I'd found a new favorite spot at the New York Public Library's Research Branch, I tried to drop by there from time to time when I was back in New York.

And then, this past March, during spring break, I went by Doma to get a cup of coffee and catch up on reading I'd had to put off because of the academic quarter, and it was closed. Emptied out. A shell. March 18, I believe, was its terminal day. I knew its hour of reckoning was coming, given that it sat on one of the primest spots in lower Manhattan, but I also though that the clientele, some of whom did belong to the 1%, could keep it afloat. But then again, since Doma did not own the building, if those 1%ers weren't directly negotiating with the landlord to keep the rent reasonable--a threat to many a business across New York--or if one of them wasn't the landlord and thus could decide to go against the grain and not gouge, the café-restaurant was going to have to clear out. It did. Sic transit...you know how that goes.

Doma na Rohu, on Morton St.

But the story doesn't end there. Because Doma miraculously did find a new spot, a bit out of the way and further south in the Village, at 27 1/2 Morton, at Seventh Avenue South. In addition to the new location, it found a new name: Doma na rohu. (Uh huh, and yes they use the lowercase letters, and I'm not making that up.) And from what I can tell it has morphed into a more beer-centric spot, with an Austro-Hungarian/Mitteleuropa focus (double huh?), perhaps because, at least a year or two ago, beer bars and beer gardens had become quite popular in New York. And Germany, which I have been noting various people in comment sections keep threatening to move to, or urging others to do so. (WTF? Also, I love beer, but grew up in a city where German beer gardens and rathskellers and street festivals featuring beer and beer itself were so plentiful it might as well have been Munich, or Prague. Ich möchte nicht in Deutschland leben jetzt oder später. That's from my high school German, and I think that's close to right, yes?) Perhaps the beer gardens still are popular, and perhaps the rich people will go live in Germany if Barack Obama wins reelection in the fall (though he does everything he can to keep them happy except tuck them into bed every night and promise them endless tax cuts, even though he's ensured they got to keep the ones that have made them obscenely rich and thrown the entire US economy out of whack).

Anyways I have not yet hied myself over to Doma Na Rohu yet, though I keep saying I will. I haven't even been back in New Jersey for an entire month yet, so that's my excuse. I will get over there, though. I'm closer than the Brooklynites and their beer gardens, but it still isn't as convenient to get to as the old spot was, and I really am not looking to drink beer in the middle of the day, pleasant as that sounds (though if it gets hot again and I'm not already in Newark, I just might reconsider), and as I said I'm not so gung-ho on the whole heavy-duty Middle European thematics--and let's not talk about the scary mess that contemporary Hungary has become, at least not in this post--but I will check it out. Uh...soon.