Jeremiah Moss > Quotes

“In a New York where people are reconceived as consumers, not citizens, it is most profitable to keep everyone moving and disconnected. This is what the hyper-globalized, ultracompetitive city looks and feels like. I saw the perfect word for it scrawled on a wall in the East Village: blandalism. Sleepwalking inside digital bubbles, the iZombies hustle through the city without looking. And you can’t really have compassion for a thing—or a person—without beholding it.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“The 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.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“I came to New York because I needed the city, and New York is for people who need cities, for those who cannot function outside of one. Open and permissive, insulating you with the sort of anonymity you can’t find in a small town or suburb, the city allows us to expand, experiment, and become our truest selves.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“In this nightly scene, my neighbor is alone at his piano and I am alone at my door. Yet, in our private worlds, we are connected, participating in this moment together. It's these two seemingly opposite states---alone and connected---that hold me.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“[New York is] the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“Reports of New York's death are not greatly exaggerated, though some would argue otherwise, insisting that the city's undomesticated heart still beats in far-off corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx, that you'll find a faint pulse in whitewashed Manhattan if you look hard enough. These insistent optimists, deep in denial, point to any trace of the old town and say, "There is New York." Yes, there it is. But it's only a remnant, a lone survivor from an endangered species rapidly vanishing.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“Among locals, Avenues A, B, C, and D stood for Adventurous, Brave, Crazy, and Dead. (In 2016, writer George Pendle told the Times they now stand for "Affluent, Bourgeois, Comfortable, and Decent.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“It’s these two opposite states, alone and connected, that hold me.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“New York would no longer be a free-spirit city. Instead, it would be a free-market city.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“When we think of New York, we most likely think of the twentieth-century city, the metropolis born from q confluence of restless, desperate people who arrived as underdogs and became the city's life force.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“Let's not delude ourselves with fantasies of objectivity. How can anyone be objective about New York? It's not a souvenir snow globe or a designer coffee table. It's a living thing, an unwieldy ecosystem filled with many smaller ecosystems, all interdependent, making up the complex, multicellular organism of the city.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“A neighborhood is an emotional ecosystem, and when it is destroyed by gentrification, it's trauma.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“And in every afflicted city, the story is the same: luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“It's the ugly extravaganza of what New York, and too many other cities, have become---playgrounds for the ultra nouveau riche, orchestrated by oligarchs in sky-high towers, the streets stripped of its character, whitewashed and varnished until they look like Anywhere, USA.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“Here is New York. This is why I stay. I stay to hear the jazz musicians playing in the parks, and to browse the tables of books for sale on the street. I stay for a drink in a quiet bar, lit by golden autumn light, and for Film Forum double features in black and white. I stay for egg creams, for the amateur opera singers practicing with their windows open so we all can listen. For the Chinese grandmothers dancing by the East River, snapping red fans in their hands. For the music of shopkeepers throwing open their gates. I stay for the unexpected spectacle, and the chance encounter, and for those tough seagulls gliding inland on rainy days to remind us that Manhattan is an island, a potential space both separate and connected. Most of all, I stay because I need New York. I can't live anywhere else, so I hold on to what remains. We've lost a lot, but there's so much left worth fighting for. And while I stay, I fight.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“One of the great tragedies of my life is I had the misfortune of arriving in New York at the beginning of its end... but we cannot choose our time of place and I hurried to New York as fast as I could.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“The scapegoats of the Giuliani era were people of color, the poor and working class, immigrants, feminists, homosexuals, socialists, bohemians. These people made New York the city it became in the twentieth century---open, progressive, diverse, and creative. They had also long been identified as enemies of the more conservative elites.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“I missed it all, over a century of the best of New York, thanks to two uncontrollable facts of my birth: its year and geographic location. But we cannot choose our time or place, and i hurried to the city as soon as I could, unaware that the early 1990s was quite possibly the worst moment to get attached to New York. It was like falling crazily in love with a ninety-three year-old, too blind to see that she was fading. I was Harold and New York my Maude.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“If you take away just one thing from this book, let it be this: Hyper-gentrification and its free-market engine is neither natural nor inevitable. It is man-made, intentional, and therefore stoppable. And yet. Just as deniers of global warming insist that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to our world's climate, so deniers of hyper-gentrification say that noting out of the ordinary is happening to New York, and that its extreme transformation in the 2000s is just natural urban change. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the weather. I'm talking about the climate, and New York's climate has been catastrophically changed.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“It's also a working-class city peopled by men and women who love with a tough love, in thick accents and no time for bullshit.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“The New York character coalesces. It's rough around the edges. Brusque and opinionated, it's also neurotic. Emphatic. It doesn't mince words. It says what it means and means what it says. Sometimes it says, 'Fuck you, you fuckin' fuck.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“There’s a big difference between tourist and traveler.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“Below 14th Street... that blessed boundary between nothing and everything.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“If New York is to survive with its soul intact, it needs all the cranky people it can get”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“Now that the neighborhood is nice enough for galleries there aren’t many artists left.”
― Jeremiah Moss

“[Hyper-gentrification] is a man-made virus that grows rhizomatically, creeping into every crack and crevice of Manhattan, reaching ever deeper into the outer boroughs, pushing out whatever stands in its way. It can be defeated. But first we must pull back the curtain and see it clearly for what it is: an act of revenge.”
― Jeremiah Moss

“One of the great tragedies of my life was that I had the misfortune to arrive in New York City at the beginning of its end.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“On the working-class, multiethnic Upper West Side alone, Moses bulldozed two stable communities of color. One, along West 98th and 99th Streets, he destroyed as a gift to the builders of a market-rate development called Manhattantown (now Park West Village). At a reunion in 2011, a former resident told the Times, “It was a great neighborhood to live in. I remember playing jacks, eating Icees, playing stickball and dodge ball, jumping double Dutch and when it got really hot out they would open up the fire hydrants.” Said another, “It wasn’t a slum; why tear it down?” The other neighborhood was San Juan Hill, destroyed to make way for Lincoln Center. An African-American and Latino working-class community, San Juan Hill was full of theaters, dance halls, and jazz clubs. In the early 1900s, it was the center of black cultural life in Manhattan, where James P. Johnson wrote the song “The Charleston,” inspired by southern black dockworkers on the Hudson River. Still, it was branded as “blight.” While they fought the city in court, 7,000 families and 800 small businesses were removed and scattered.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“New York is for people who need cities, for those who cannot function outside of one. Open and permissive, insulating you with the sort of anonymity you can't find in a small town or suburb, the city allows us to expand, experiment, and become our truest selves.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“Being hated by America was good for the city, and good for America. Every family needs a black sheep.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul