View from the Top is a series exploring NYC real estate for buyers, sellers, renters, and investors by a long-time New Yorker, licensed real estate professional, husband-dad, and Lower East Side local. Bop the button below to subscribe, and scroll down for the goodies.
Scene 39
Welcome to the penthouse, where I’m sharing the best views in NYC with real estate buyers, sellers, investors—and yes, even voyeurs. 👀
After analyzing and enriching data from buildings across Manhattan, I’m serving up insights designed to save you time and money. 💡💰
Today, I’ll share some thoughts stemming from a book I recently read: Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul 📚 by Jeremiah Moss.
I’m a voracious reader—listener, really, so I don’t deserve all the cool points—taking down 25–50 books a year. (Usually closer to 25… but I still want some cool points. 😏)
Part 1 of 2
This book is special and, I’d argue, essential for urbanites—especially New Yorkers—to read.
I was drawn to it for the historical perspective, one that could remind me of my own experiences living in New York over the past 25 years. Vanishing New York was, to my joy and sorrow, like reading a chronicle of my own life in this city.
Moss’s account of “hyper-gentrification”—that accelerated wave of commercialization, luxury development, and policy-enabled displacement—hit me with both recognition and unease. He writes with a mix of snark, sorrow, and nostalgia, tracing how the mom-and-pop shops, creative enclaves, and layered cultural histories that once defined neighborhoods have been erased, often replaced by luxury condos, national chains, and a mall-ified sameness.
His villains are not just developers but also policymakers—from Giuliani to Bloomberg—who greased the wheels, offering tax breaks and incentives that transformed neighborhoods in ways that privileged capital over community. 💸
It’s the neoliberal ideology, and—as Moss puts it—it’s “neither new, nor liberal.” (Jeremiah Moss, by the way, is a pseudonym.)
I’ve lived through nearly every chapter of the story he tells. My own path in New York has taken me across neighborhoods—like the ones mentioned in verse one of I Sell Everywhere—that Moss holds up as case studies in transformation:
Windsor Terrace in 1999, in the long shadow of Park Slope’s first big wave
Fort Greene in 2001–2002, on the frontier of Bed-Stuy
Williamsburg from 2002 to 2004, right as it tilted from industrial edge to hipster epicenter
Long Island City in 2005, before glass towers began sprouting along the waterfront
Others in between, and for the past eight years, the Lower East Side—where Moss’s observations feel especially raw
I’ve walked past—and into—many of the landmarks Moss mourns, including Max Fish, where I happened on a young Natalie Portman, and Kossar’s, which is still open and where I get my bialys—but it ain’t what it was. He also foreshadows many of the (yet, at the time of publication) unnamed developments, some of which I’ve covered, including:
These developments sprinkle in “affordable” units to meet quotas, but in certain cases—like one on West 42nd Street in the book—they have separate entrances and amenities for “non-affordable” and “affordable” residents, underscoring exactly who belongs where. It’s a sanitized version of inclusivity: legal in letter, hollow in spirit.
Moss has been criticized for his nostalgia. But I see the value—not as longing for the past at the expense of the future, but as a reminder that heritage matters.
📈 Catch the next elevator up!