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Feral City

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My new book, Feral City , hits the shelves October 4, 2022. You can pre-order it today from your local bookshop and wherever books are sold. Thank you! What happens when an entire social class abandons a metropolis? This genre-bending journey through lockdown New York offers an exhilarating, intimate look at a city returned to its rebellious spirit.    The pandemic lockdown of 2020 launched an unprecedented urban experiment. Traffic disappeared from the streets. Times Square fell silent. And half a million residents fled the most crowded city in America. In this innovative and thrilling book, author and social critic Jeremiah Moss, hailed as “New York City’s career elegist” (New York Times), explores a city emptied of the dominant class—and their controlling influence. “Plagues have a disinhibiting effect,” Moss writes. “As the normal order is suspended, the repressive force of civilization lifts and our rules fall away, shifting the boundaries of society and psyche."  In publ
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The Battle for Public Space

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As New York City reopens after lockdown, it is also closing down. During 2020, especially from spring to summer, many New Yorkers who ventured into the streets found a joyful and communal openness to the city, in the midst of so much anxiety and grief during the pandemic. In public parks, we gathered together, in mixtures of races and classes, to play music, dance, and connect politically for actions we hoped would change the world for the better. Coalitions formed. Empathy increased. Friendships were made. As spring 2021 came, this vibrant new life continued--but the city is working hard to shut it down and "get back to normal."    This repeated demand for normal always reminds me of the words from author and activist Sonya Renee Taylor: “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was never normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack. We should not
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Eisenberg's

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 VANISHED One of the greatest, and one of my favorites, has gone. After temporarily shuttering during the pandemic, Eisenberg's sandwich shop , near the Flatiron since 1929, has closed for good. A For Lease sign is in the window. I went by yesterday and talked with building manager Jackie Valiente who told me that she and the building owner would love to save Eisenberg's, but they need someone to take it over and keep it as it is. "Someone who wants the old Eisenberg's," she said, "the old concept of New York." That concept, said customer Arnold Engelman, is simple. "Eisenberg's is what New York's all about," he told me. "People gathering in places they know, knowing the owners and the owners knowing them. This doesn't exist anymore." Arnold has been coming to Eisenberg's since he was a kid, growing up on 11th Street. Jackie has been eating at Eisenberg's since 1976. It's the kind of place you keep going
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Waste

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This article in the Guardian begins, "On a damp and humid Thursday afternoon Manhattan’s Union Square is looking sorry for itself. There’s 73,000 sq ft of empty retail space up for grabs at 44 Union Square in the now boarded up neo-Georgian landmark that was once Tammany Hall."  What it doesn't mention is the fact that several small mom-and-pop businesses were pushed out of the building in 2016 to make room for, undoubtedly, more chain and luxury businesses that would fit the class of workers intended for the building's high-tech makeover.      Frank's Wines & Liquors had been there for over 40 years. A deli went, along with a smoke shop and magazine shop. Also pushed out were the New York Film Academy and the Union Square Theater. It's unlikely that those high-tech workers are coming. And the chain stores probably aren't either, since they've now "abandoned" Manhattan after helping to destroy it.  It is deeply regrettable that the lea
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Bluestockings

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The wonderful, radical, fiercely essential, collectively owned Bluestockings bookstore and activist center is leaving. "This is not goodbye," they write . "This is 'wait for our new location announcement,' hopefully soon." "Though we wish we were making this decision on our own terms, our decision has been forced by the demands of our landlord for more money and by their inaction on necessary repairs to the structural damage our wild little slice of space has endured over these last 21 years." Let's hope they stay in the neighborhood of the Lower East Side, though that seems rather unlikely. UPDATE: So happy to hear that Bluestockings bookstore has the keys to their new home--still on the LES--at 116 Suffolk! Here's a chance to send them some money for their move.
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Odessa

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VANISHING UPDATE: False alarm! Now they say they're just renovating . Back in 2013, the old Odessa closed . This Odessa was also known as the "dark" Odessa. It was the first Odessa and the one I loved best. Now the new Odessa, also known as a the "light" Odessa, is closing. Odessa in miniature by Nicholas Buffon When the old Odessa still existed, I didn't go much to the new Odessa because it felt redundant and too new when it opened back in 1990-whenever. Then, when the old Odessa closed, I went to the new Odessa (which was no longer new) because it was no longer redundant and, in fact, was one of the only places left in the East Village where you could get a simple diner meal and not be surrounded by the worst people. Now it's closing. Their last day will be July 19. You can't go inside to sit and eat because we're in a pandemic, remember? But you can order something to go and while you wait you can imagine that you're sitting i
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Washington Square Bloodied

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In the aftermath of yesterday's incident of police brutality against New Yorkers participating in the Queer Liberation March for Black Lives and Against Police Brutality, someone has made a bold statement in Washington Square Park. Early this morning, I went by the park to find the statues of George Washington on the Arch vividly splattered in blood-red paint. (Below his feet on one side, graffiti from weeks ago still shows "fuck12 since 1492.") On the other side of the arch, more blood splatter. (Above more faded graffiti: "Stolen Lands FTP.") Crime scene body outlines ring the fountain, one after another, their torsos and heads blasted with red as if shot dead. While some of the paint was still wet, bits of rubber balloon left behind, detectives surveyed the incendiary work of graffiti art. A cooler full of watery, blood-red paint stands open before the spectacle. This will be temporary, paint washes off, but the lives lost to po
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