The EVG podcast: A 'Vanishing New York' conversation with Jeremiah Moss

[Image via Vanishing New York]

This episode of the EVG podcast features a conversation with Jeremiah Moss, the writer behind the blog Vanishing New York. The paperback edition of his book, "Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul," is out this week. (The paperback launch event is tonight at 7:30 at Books Are Magic, 225 Smith St. in Brooklyn.)

Jeremiah joined me in the East Village Radio studio on First Avenue to discuss moving to NYC 25 years ago, starting his blog and attempting to save small businesses from extinction. We also talk about how he encouraged me to start the EV Grieve blog 11 years ago.



Previously on EV Grieve:
The EVG podcast: Red-tailed hawk talk with Laura Goggin

The EVG podcast with Mike Katz and Crispin Kott, the authors of "Rock and Roll Explorer Guide to New York City."

About #SaveNYC

Jeremiah Moss of Vanishing New York has launched the #SaveNYC campaign.

He writes about it today in an op-ed over at the Daily News.

Small businesses in New York City have no rights. You’ve been here 50 years and provide an important service? Tough luck — your space now belongs to Dunkin’ Donuts. You own a beloved, fourth-generation, century-old business? Get out — your landlord’s putting in a combination Chuck E. Cheese and Juicy Couture.

And despite de Blasio’s rhetorical fears about gentrification, his progressive pro-development push may well only hasten the trend.

Read the op-ed, titled The NYC we love is disappearing: It's becoming a hollow city for hollow people, right here. Find out how you can get involved at the #SaveNYC website.

Jeremiah's Vanishing New York

The Post today features our blogging friend Jeremiah Moss on its My New York page… his list of favorite NYC places highlights many from the East Village, including Ray's Candy Store and Theatre 80… Check it out here.

East Village noise wars go national

Thanks to Jeremiah Moss for including my thoughts in a piece for The Huffington Post titled, Fighting the Noise Wars -- One Blog at a Time. He also includes commentary from Jill at Blah Blog Blah.

More on the possibly vanishing mosiacs

Continuing our conversation about the possible loss of the mosaics.... Jeremiah Moss shared this photo with me...



We're all hopeful that a Vanishing tribute to these will never have to be written.

Don't mess with Mr. G

Been a little slack. On my to-do list since, uh, last summer...join Jeremiah's Urban Etiquette Signs pool at Flickr. Anyway, here are a few candidates from making the rounds in recent months...

Jeremiah Moss in the Daily News: "Many of us are feeling giddily optimistic about this city for the first time in a decade"

Jeremiah Moss has an opinion piece in the Daily News today. Here's an excerpt:

Supposedly, all of New York City is suffering from a mass collective malaise, a dark cloud of shared pessimism. But the truth is very different. In reality, many of us are feeling giddily optimistic about this city for the first time in a decade.

Who are these crazy optimists? Head-in-the-sand deniers of the economic calamity? No, just people who welcome the possibility that the unique character of New York, sanitized in the Giuliani and Bloomberg years, may finally return.

As the writer of the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, where I catalogue the city that's being lost to hypergentrification, I have heard hope rising from many vocal readers -- hope that we'll at last have our beloved, wild, creative, eclectic city back.

Since the boom began approximately 10 years ago, many New Yorkers have watched with grief and anger while the city we love was crushed by overzealous development, the all-encompassing renovation plan of Mayor Bloomberg. This plan has gutted countless mom-and-pop businesses and landmarks like Coney Island and Yankee Stadium. It has extended to the use of eminent domain to seize private property from its owners. What we have received in return has been a city of glass, cold and calculated, built for only the superrich seekers of safety to enjoy.

[Image: dboo/Flickr]

About this time last year

Page Six ran the following item:

December 20, 2007 -- It may be the final nail in the shared coffin of East Village dive bars. Two longstanding holes-in-the-wall, Sophie's on East Fifth Street and its sister spot, Mona's on Avenue B, are up for sale. "The neighborhood has changed so much," co-owner Bob Corton told Page Six. "I love both bars, but they're dinosaurs now." Corton plans to sell the low-lit saloons after the holidays. He has run Sophie's, which adopted its name from its original owner, the late Sophie Polny, since 1986. He opened Mona's in '89. Corton assured us he'll stay in the neighborhood but couldn't predict the future of his beloved drink tanks: "Once the places are sold, what happens to them is really out of my hands."

Sure, we had heard rumors that the bars might be for sale, but it didn't seem like a reality until it appeared in print. (How this ended up in print may be fodder for another post another day.)

So what started back in December 2007 on a drunken, lonely night (always a good combination for doing something stupid, like starting a blog! Plus, actually, it was the middle of the afternoon!) seemed like a temporary thing. At first I'd just collect different news items on the possible sale of the bars. (It wasn't to be gossipy or anything, like, "Melvin wore the same pants again today and drank 17 pints of Yuengling...") Then I thought it could evolve into this project we could all be part of...making little films about the people, etc., who've made Sophie's what it is. Post photos. Chronicling the (possible) end of days. It would be a document capturing a special time and place.

Well, before I ever really figured what to do with the site or told anyone about it, it looked as if the bars were staying in the family. So I retired the site on that positive note.

Right-o! Then, on Feb. 6, Jeremiah Moss, who had been supportive of whatever I had been doing, left a comment encouraging me to continue, to turn my attention to other things in the neighborhood.

Jeremiah Moss said...
hey grieve, whether or not sophie's goes, i hope you'll continue to blog about stuff in our neighborhood. there's plenty of bloggable material to go around!

Phhht! Right!

So, yeah, I continued. Slowly at first. But I was inspired...I began paying attention again to the little things. I became reinvigorated despite the bankbranchification, duanereadification, etc., etc., of the area. I started loving living here again. Really.

Anyway, here I am...grateful to everyone who has been a reader...and I've enjoyed making friends with so many like-minded people who also wonder what the fuck is going on around here. Thank you for being part of this.

More before-and-afters from New York magazine

I had a post yesterday morning on New York's jaw-dropper of a piece this week titled The Glass Stampede. Here are more before-and-after shots from the feature:


11 and 22 East 1st Street


Palladium Residence Hall on East 14th Street.


One Astor Place


Union Square West

Also! I was so delirious looking at all this that I missed the article's reference to "one" Jeremiah Moss on the first pass yesterday.

As Justin Davidson wrote:

In his 1962 poem “An Urban Convalescence,” James Merrill captured the feverish yet methodical sacking of the city and the way it toys with our sense of comfortable familiarity.

As usual in New York, everything is torn down
Before you have had time to care for it.
Head bowed, at the shrine of noise,
let me try to recall
What building stood here.
Was there a building at all?

Among Merrill’s disciples is one Jeremiah Moss, who maintains the engagingly gloomy blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, which he terms “an ongoing obituary for my dying city.” His topic is the steady erosion of the city’s texture. He is the defender of all the undistinguished hunks of masonry that lend the streets their rhythm and give people a place to live and earn a living: bodegas, curio stores, a metalworking shop in Soho, diners, and dingy bars.

"I'd like to see a city in which everybody can have a niche and survive"

That's Jeremiah Moss, the proprietor behind Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, an influential, must-read site for anyone who cares what's happening to this city. He and Lost City's Brooks of Sheffield are featured in The Villager this week in Patrick Hedlund's "Mixed Use" column. Hedlund is a good guy who wrote the nice feature on Sophie's/Mona's in January. I'm happy that he's giving these sites some press.

Anyway, read the piece here. And visit these sites.

The origins of Sophie's

Our favorite New York-related blog, Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, had an excellent post Jan. 2 on Sophie's. He spoke with owner Bob Corton, who discussed the bar's history...and future:

In the 1980s, Bob worked for bar owner Sophie Polny, a tough old lady who ran a pub on Avenue A. Bob became manager when Sophie moved her bar (known only as the Polny Restaurant Corp.) to its current location on 5th between A & B, into a space occupied by a joint called the Chic Choc, named for partners Virginia Chicarelli and someone called Chocolate. “Chic Choc” is still written on the doorstep of Sophie’s.

Sophie Polny didn’t like to spend money. Bob recalls, “She only got a jukebox because it came free with the pool table. But she mostly used it for sitting on. The jukebox was her perch.” When she moved to 5th Street, rather than buy new, she brought her old wooden bar with her. It’s still there today, with its stained-glass cabinet doors and cottage-roof motif, a popular style dating back to (from my best guess) the early 20th century.The bar used to open at 10:00 in the morning for the old Ukrainian men who liked to sit all day over beer and shots of vodka. Said Bob, “If I showed up to open at 10:01, there’d be 8 guys waiting out front to get in and they’d hand me a bag of shit for being late.”

Please read the rest here. He also has photo's of Sophie's on his Flickr page.