Apple Awards

Last week I gratefully received two Apple Awards from the Guides Association of New York City.

One was for "Outstanding Achievement in Support of New York City Preservation," for #SaveNYC, and the second award was for "Outstanding New York City Website," for Vanishing New York.



Congratulations to the other winners and thank you to the GANYC. The apples have a good home, book-ending some antique guides to the city.


Click here for more information on the Guides Association and the Apple Awards.

The NIMBYs of New York

Crain's published an article this month on "the masters of derailing projects in the city." I haven't derailed anything, regrettably, as much as I've tried, but they included me on their list anyway -- along with a number of folks who are getting stuff done.

NIMBYs? "Anti-change activists"? Are these the right terms for people who aim to preserve the character of New York City?



Here's my bit:

The shadow player

Mr. Berman is one of the most visible anti-development activists. Others, like Jeremiah Moss, operate in the shadows. Mr. Moss uses a fake name and refuses to have his picture taken, yet his blog, Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, has become the go-to hub for those who lament New York's loss of character.

Mr. Moss uses his online following to stage attention-grabbing theatrics, like hosting a funeral for a beloved 82-year-old shoe-repair shop under threat of closure.

He recently shifted tactics from covering the frequent closure of iconic New York dive bars and restaurants to getting involved in the effort to save those businesses. He doesn't consider himself as influential as Mr. Berman or as effective as Mr. Gruen.

But he hopes his "#SaveNYC" movement, a self-described do-it-yourself anti-gentrification crusade, can persuade the City Council to pass the Small Business Jobs Survival Act to help commercial tenants avoid being priced out.

"I'm good at making noise," Mr. Moss said. "I think of myself as a cage-rattler. Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention."

Which New York?

For the 50th anniversary of the Landmarks Law, Justin Davidson at New York Magazine talked with me and Nikolai Fedak, blogger of the pro-development NY YIMBY. While mostly polite, it was a spirited conversation, at times a grudge match.

An abbreviated version appears in the print edition of the current magazine, and a longer version appears online.



An excerpt:

NF: ...In East Harlem, you have a proposal for a 50-story tower on top of the Target, which is going to be fantastic. People in the neighborhood object, but they can’t do anything about it.

JD: So powerlessness leads to a good result?

JM: I want to go back to something Nikolai was saying earlier and question the idea that New York has to compete, that the city has to keep growing, that it has to be the best. That’s a very corporate notion, and it’s a foreign concept to me. If we just keep growing and competing and winning, where do we end up, ultimately? With a city filled, from borough to borough, with nothing but gleaming skyscrapers. And then the city will die. At what point do we say that’s enough?

NF: But how could that actually happen —?

JM: It already is happening. Julian Brash wrote the book Bloomberg’s New York, in which he described how Bloomberg changed the way we think of the city. He talked about it as a luxury product and about himself as CEO. He treated New Yorkers like consumers rather than citizens. That is a very different way of thinking about people. Citizens speak up and fight for their rights. Consumers don’t.

JD: Fighting for your rights and interests is obviously an important part of citizenship, but it also creates the adversarial situation that Nikolai was describing, in which the wealthy will always have the upper hand. A lot of planning takes place through litigation, which can be democratic without being fair.

JM: Sure, in an ideal world, everyone would have equal access and power, but if they don’t, that just means they have to fight for it.

NF: There’s room here for everyone if you build adequate housing for them. Prewar neighborhoods like the Upper West Side have buildings that don’t meet the standards of 2015. Why should the poor live in such places in order to preserve the architecture?

JD: There are plenty of wealthy people living in old buildings with creaky plumbing, too.

JM: So, Nikolai, do you have a fantasy that if you tore down and rebuilt all those buildings, the people who live there would be able to move back in?

NF: My fantasy is a New York where everyone has access to comfortable housing.

JM: Well, yeah, how can I disagree with that? My apartment is a shithole. But I have to hold on to my shithole. I have to fight for my shithole.

NF: That mentality is what makes it impossible for the city to accommodate more people.

JM: I don’t want to accommodate more people. There are too many fucking people here already.

NF: There! That’s the difference between us. I think the city needs to evolve, and Jeremiah’s nostalgic for the city of the past.

JM: What I’m nostalgic for is the city of the present...


Click here for the full discussion

#SaveNYC in the News

Both CNBC and WPIX 11 covered #SaveNYC today.

Nationally, Kate Rogers did the story at CNBC's Squawk Box, interviewing the folks at Avignone Pharmacy and Jim's Shoe Repair.




And Dan Mannarino's got it at the WPIX 11 Morning News. He visited Bleecker Street and talked with Avignone pharmacy:





Support small businesses in New York by going to #SaveNYC and adding a video or photo. Tweet, Instagram, spread the word.

#SaveNYC in the Daily News

From my op-ed in today's 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.

That’s why I started the #SaveNYC campaign. We’re collecting video testimonials from New Yorkers and out-of-towners, celebrities and small business owners, asking City Hall to preserve the cultural fabric of the greatest city on earth...

Read the whole article here.

Dear Taylor

In today's Daily News, I've written an open letter to Taylor Swift, New York City's Global Welcome Ambassador:



Dear Taylor,

Since you were named New York City’s “Global Welcome Ambassador,” you’ve been widely mocked, including by this paper. Sure, haters gonna hate. They say you’re not qualified for the job because you’ve only been in New York for a few months, you live in the luxury bubble of a $20 million penthouse and you don’t eat dirty-water hot dogs.

I disagree. For those reasons and more, you are absolutely qualified to welcome bright-eyed visitors to the new New York, a city that has been made over into a sterilized playground for suburbanites, tourists and oligarchs...

Please read the whole thing here

*Note: In the print edition, the News added a subhead saying I'm a native. I am not.

Update: The New York Post's editorial board responded quickly to the Swift backlash. They quote me as a snarky "snob":

"No sooner had Taylor Swift been named Global Welcome Ambassador for New York than the snobs opened fire. One complains she’s a 'whitebread out-of-towner' only recently moved here. Another snarks how the seven-time Grammy winner is the perfect choice for a city 'made over into a sterilized playground for suburbanites, tourists and oligarchs.'"

Village Voice: Best of New York 2014

The Village Voice has included this blog in their Best of New York 2014 issue, naming it "Best Chronicle of New York's Ever-Changing Face."




Many thanks to the unnamed someone at the paper who wrote this lovely and lyrical description:

New York is changing at light-speed, with glassy condos and fro-yo shops mushrooming out of every corner. Sometimes it's hard to even take stock of all the changes; it can take weeks or months before you notice that your favorite old sign for a '30s jazz club has disappeared, or an Italian restaurant that has been tucked in some corner of (what's left of) Little Italy since the dawn of time. No one takes stock of New York's changes with the same mixture of snark, sorrow, poeticism, and lyric wit as Jeremiah Moss, the voice behind Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. Nothing escapes Moss's notice: When a beautiful robin's-egg-blue newsstand was suddenly gone from the corner of 23rd Street and Park Avenue South this past summer, he mourned its passing. "It was crooked and quirky, just like all our newsstands used to be. It had character," he eulogized. "Really it was the only bit of original New York character left on that chain-strangled corner." Even as the changes he's cataloging break our hearts a little, it's that kind of lovely, precise writing that makes Moss's blog essential reading.

Bird Garden

From my piece in today's Metro NY:

On a Saturday morning at the Hua Mei Bird Garden in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, where the Lower East Side rubs up against Chinatown, the trees are full of birdcages. Half shrouded in white cloths, they look like Halloween ghosts, bouncing a little in the branches. Up close, you find that each one is carved from bamboo and contains a single songbird...



...It’s the end of summer. The air has shifted. Already, the leaves of the London Plane trees are brown and falling. One drops into my lap, like a living thing, and I think of a line from a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

“Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!”

Please read the whole essay here.

Battle of Brooklyn

For my piece in this week's Metro, a visit to the Battle of Brooklyn celebration.



On a beautifully temperate Sunday afternoon, I went to Green-Wood Cemetery to watch a group of Revolutionary War reenactors celebrate the Battle of Brooklyn. Dressed in their eighteenth-century best, they stuffed a cannon with balls of tinfoil and shot them towards the distant harbor. “Cover your ears,” warned a man in a tricorn hat before the boom and the ring of floating smoke. The monk parrots nesting in the nearby trees were not pleased.

Benjamin Franklin walked around with his kite, ostensibly waiting for lightning to strike, but the sky was stormless, a clear summer blue. Another man held up a leafy twig, explaining, “This is from a tree planted during the American Revolution. It grows in Woodside, Queens. I think it’s called a beech tree, but I’m really not sure.”

I walked to the top of Battle Hill to look at the statue of Minerva. In her helmet and armored breastplate, she waves down to the Statue of Liberty, who seems not to notice or care. They’re like a couple of estranged sisters, these two, one ignoring the other’s overture...

Please read the rest of the essay at Metro

Dive Bars

In Newsweek this week, Alexander Nazaryan discusses the death of the dive bar in his article "Yuppies Are Killing the Dive Bar."



"All across the land," he writes, "laments have been going up for dive bars in recent years, as beloved establishments pull their last pint, replaced by corporate outposts that are far more morbid than what they’ve replaced. This isn’t a trend; it’s an epidemic."

He lists a few of New York's recent losses, visits the Subway Inn, brings in Joseph Mitchell, and includes a couple quotes from me (“The new New Yorkers skeeve everything that reminds them of aging and death. They want a constantly re-lifted face-lift”).

Nazaryan also speculates on the reason for the dive bar's death:

"The reasons for the disappearance of dive bars can be found in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. No, seriously. The way we drink, where we drink, largely reflects how educated we are, how much money we have, whether we even have the leisure time for unhurried bibulous consumption. The death of the dive suggests that we don’t drink together anymore, as a single nation yearning for a quick post-work respite or Saturday-afternoon escape. The rich can pay several hundred dollars for a single coveted shot of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve; the poor, meanwhile, drink Cobra out of paper bags and Miller Lite in busted lawn chairs. The dive bar used to be for those in the middle, those who had a little money and a little time, not to mention a little curiosity about the human race: the mid-level bank manager, the cop, the teacher, the hopeful writer, the waitress. They dove together into the sloppy democracy of cheap beer."

Check out the whole article here--it's a good read.

Leo's Latticini

For my column in today's Metro NY, a visit to Leo's Latticini in Corona, Queens.



“Is this your first time here?” she asks from the kitchen, her hands over a basin of milky water where she’s pulling mozzarella like it’s taffy.

I nod. I must look lost.

“You like mozzarella? Come. Taste.”

She rips off a hunk of the soft cheese, squeezes it in her dripping fist, and thrusts it towards me. Like a good Catholic faced with the Eucharist, I take and I eat. The fresh cheese is warm, silky, and delicious.

“Chew it good,” she says.



This is my introduction to Irene DeBenedittis of Leo’s Laticcini, also known as Mama’s of Corona. Irene makes the mozzarella and her sister Marie does the cooking—turkey with gravy, roast pork, manicotti, you name it.

“I don’t use recipes,” says Marie. “I just go on instinct" ...

Please read the rest of the essay here.

Unchain the City

From my most recent Op-Ed in the Daily News this weekend:

Soon there will be no New York left in New York. The city is becoming, for the first time in its long and illustrious history of exceptionalism, just another Anywhere, U.S.A. What has de Blasio done to protect New York’s small businesses and control the virulent spread of national chains? Nothing much.



Before he was elected, I asked him in an online Q&A what he planned to do. In his answer, he called small businesses “incredibly important to the character and strength of our neighborhoods” and said he wanted to follow the example of the Upper West Side’s “mom-and-pop” rezoning, designed to protect small shops from being forced out for chains. That’s actually a fairly weak rezoning, but it’s a start — one that de Blasio has yet to follow through on. It’s time for the mayor to step up and take action against the destruction of the city’s character.

Read the rest here.

Daily Beast

Journalist and author Tim Teeman just did an interview with me over at The Daily Beast. In "The End of New York," we talk about chain stores, cellphones, suburbanization, hyper-gentrification, and polar bears.  

Read it here.



P.S. You can buy Tim's book, In Bed with Gore Vidal, at Three Lives bookshop in Greenwich Village.

The Dog

On Sunday, I had a piece published in The Daily News on a new documentary called The Dog, about the real guy behind Dog Day Afternoon. You can read it here in the paper.



The unedited, original version of my essay--including a few more details--is here:

On a sultry day in August, 1972, John Wojtowicz tried to rob a bank in Brooklyn. He needed the money for his transgender wife’s sex reassignment surgery. He failed. He did succeed, however, in entertaining and titillating the entire city, becoming an “only in New York” cult figure, and getting immortalized by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Wojtowicz gave the movie money to his wife, she got her surgery, and he went to prison—where he styled himself as a Gay Liberation icon.

“I’m like Babe Ruth, but the gay Babe Ruth,” says Wojtowicz in The Dog, a riveting 100-minute documentary about one man’s unconventional life.

After earning high praise on the festival circuit, The Dog, co-directed by Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren, opens in New York on August 8 at IFC Center and Lincoln Center. Packed with old-school outer-borough characters and rare archival footage from the lost gritty city, the film’s arrival in today’s squeaky-clean New York is a rollicking reminder of when life was less orderly.

“Things were looser then,” says Berg. “It was a messier time. Today it feels like we’re in one big sanitized city. We loved getting back to the fast-talking, street-hustling dirty New York. It was full of characters you just don’t have today.”

Characters like John’s first wife, Carmen Bifulco, and his prison wife, George Heath. Liz Eden, the reason for the robbery, is here in grainy archival interviews, a lithe, beautiful boy who transitions into a striking woman. There’s the captivating Terry, John’s elderly mother, an Italian-American spitfire. And, of course, there’s The Dog himself—charismatic, controlling, and unabashedly foul-mouthed.

Says Keraudren, “John’s like if you took all of Scorsese’s characters and rolled them into one. But he’s also gay.”

Wojtowicz was a Stonewall-era fighter for LGBT rights. With the Gay Activists Alliance, he participated in the first gay marriage protest at City Hall. Then he held people hostage at gunpoint, because his wife was suicidal and only surgery would save her. Through all his seemingly conflicting words and actions, what emerges is a fascinating story of a complex character who fell somewhere between hero and loser, sane and crazy, good and bad.

Bob Kappstatter, reporting for The Daily News, was on the scene at the robbery. He recalls meeting a twitchy Wojtowicz face to face, with NYPD sniper rifles pointing at them. The robber was impatient—and sweaty. The police had turned off the air conditioning in the bank and the hostages suffered.

“The hostages liked him,” recalls George Heath. “They realized he wasn’t a criminal criminal. He gave them all money.”

Was Wojtowicz the heroic figure he longed to be? Kappstatter calls him “a person with a strong ego, passion, and a flair for screwing up his and others’ lives.” Heath says, “John was a hero in his own way. He saved someone’s life. He did what he felt needed to be done.”

As filmmakers, Berg and Keraudren try not to choose sides. “You’re not there to judge,” Keraudren explains. “On a good day, John was great. On a bad day, he was sociopathic.”

“We had complicated feelings about him,” says Berg. “He was a once-in-a-lifetime character. He also drove us up the wall.” The filmmakers followed Wojtowicz for a decade, until his death from cancer in 2006. He also followed them, calling at all hours of the night and showing up on doorsteps. “Once you were in John’s world,” says Berg, “he wanted you there all the time.”

Maybe that’s what ultimately drove Wojtowicz’s actions—an obsessive need, call it a doggedness, to keep people in his world, all the time.



In addition, a photography show accompanies the film. It opens tomorrow. 

From the press release: "On Wednesday, August 6th at 7:00pm the Film Society of Lincoln Center's The Furman Gallery at the Walter Reade Theater will premiere photos taken by Marcia Resnick of The Dog himself, John Wojtowicz, the inspiration for Al Pacino's character in Dog Day Afternoon, at his most candid in the 1970's. The exhibit will stay up until August 15th."

Preserving Classic New York Award

Thank you to the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts for their Preserving Classic New York Award.

Debating Gentrification

The New York Times' "Room for Debate" asked me to participate in their discussion on gentrification and what can be done about it.

Here's my take--in 300 words (for the longer, more thorough version, check out my post on hyper-gentrification):

The old-school gentrification of the 20th century, while harmful, wasn’t all bad. It made streets safer, created jobs and brought fresh vegetables to the corner store. Today, however, what we talk about when we talk about gentrification is actually a far more destructive process, one that I prefer to call hyper-gentrification.

Unlike gentrification, in which the agents of change were middle-class settlers moving into working-class and poor neighborhoods, in hyper-gentrification the change comes from city government in collaboration with large corporations. Widespread transformation is intentional, massive and swift, resulting in a completely sanitized city filled with brand-name mega-developments built for the luxury class. The poor, working and middle classes are pushed out, along with artists, and the city goes stale. Urban scholar Neil Smith wrote extensively about the phenomenon, calling it “a systematic class-remaking of city neighborhoods.”

Cultivated by former mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, hyper-gentrification in New York was implemented via strategically planned mass rezonings, eminent domain and billions in tax breaks to corporations. This led to the eviction of countless residents and small businesses, destroying the fabric of our streets and putting the city’s soul on life support. To save it, we need politicians, activists and citizens to get tough and retake this city. Let’s drastically reduce tax breaks to corporations and redirect that money to mom-and-pops. Protect the city’s oldest small businesses by providing selective retail rent control, and implement the Small Business Survival Act to create fair rent negotiations. Pass a citywide ordinance to control the spread of chain stores. Strengthen residential rent regulation. Shop local and protest the corporate invasion of neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, too many New Yorkers say, “This is normal. The city always changes.” They’re in denial. This is not normal. It is state-sponsored, corporate-driven and turbo-charged.

The first step to healing is to admit we have a problem.

Read the whole debate here

Norwegian Business Daily

Journalist Morten Bertelsen interviewed me for the December 27 edition of the Norwegian Business Daily newspaper Dagens Næringsliv. The article is entitled "The Hook on the Door of Old New York," about how "New York has become the new Dubai under Mayor Bloomberg believes critics." (As translated by Google.)

"The hook's on the door" is an expression used when something comes to an end, like closing up shop and putting the hook on the door. So the old New York has closed up shop.



The article focuses on the city's land grab of Willets Point in Queens. "A robbery!" says 81-year-old Joseph Ardizzone, the only resident of Willets Point. "A robbery in broad daylight. Bloomberg stealing properties customers to give them the billionaire friends its so they can build shopping mall and casino here. Casino!" (Also via Google translator.)

Here I am in Norwegian:



And Google translated:

"A kind of Dubai"
Mayor Michael Bloomberg get off at New Year. He changed New York during its 12 year. Critics say the worse. - Bloomberg has made New York to a kind of Dubai, one luxury that could lain where any time with its endless chain stores and an increasing number of suburban mentality, says Jeremiah Moss. The author documents the transformation blog "Vanishing New York." It is not just about nostalgia, but also a city with increasing differences.

Moss is not alone in viewing this. The new mayor, Democrat Bill de Blasio, called autumn New York story of two cities - the rich and the poor, where the gap is only increasing. He was 74 percent of the vote. - New York is dramatically changed under Bloomberg. He said early on that he saw the city as a luxury product, and wanted that billionaires from around the world would settle here. So he set out to create the city, says Moss. 40 percent of the city area is rezoned under Bloomberg. Many of the 40,000 new buildings are luxurious high-rises and skyscrapers. People from higher socioeconomic team has taken over the old working bastions. 

- Countless small businesses, which went well for decades, were forced out. Rents soared. In some places they were tenfold. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed and reconstructed almost over night, playgrounds and shopping for the super rich, says Moss. The old slaughter district is perhaps the most glaring example, believes Moss. The record was Meatpacking District turned into a blinded white Aker Brygge. The old quarters in Greenwich Village - Counterculture the stronghold decades - memories today about Bogstadsveien Oslo. Even dirty Bowery on the east side of the island washed slowly away.

Financial Times

I got the chance recently to talk to the UK's Financial Times about my search for Hopper's "Nighthawks" diner, and about Bloomberg's New York, and all that stuff I'm always talking about. Journalist John O'Connor did the interview and artfully arranged my answers for their weekend magazine's "First Person" column.

Steve Schofield also took a very fine "cloak and dagger" photo, kind of noirish, by the Whitney's Nighthawks installation at the Flatiron Building.



Visit the Financial Times to read the whole article here.