Jeremiah Moss Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

New York would no longer be a free-spirit city. Instead, it would be a free-market city.

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.

A neighborhood is an emotional ecosystem, and when it is destroyed by gentrification, it's trauma.