A Cranky Blogger Crusades to Preserve the Ordinary in New York

Here’s an old story: Your favorite dive bar/record shop/little Cuban restaurant gets turned into a Citibank/Apple store/luxury condominium. You pass through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, then inevitably settle into acceptance.

For nearly a decade, Jeremiah Moss has been telling that story on his brilliantly dismal blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, a digital obituary column for the various mom-and-pop concerns that have fallen prey to the city’s endless search for higher rents. A wistful man with a vulture’s eye for carrion, Mr. Moss has dedicated years to recording the demise of famous institutions like the Roseland Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan, which will soon become a high-rise building, and unfamiliar treasures like Family Jewels, a clothing store in Chelsea, which is scheduled to close at the end of April.

But then something happened last fall. Mr. Moss, which is not his real name — more on that to come — took part in a doomed attempt to save the Café Edison, a beloved Times Square coffee shop whose landlord was looking to replace it with a classier establishment. When the effort failed, it left Mr. Moss radicalized. Deciding it was time to devote himself to effecting change, not just to chronicling its ravages, Mr. Moss embarked on a quest to rescue the rest of New York’s small businesses through a media campaign organized beneath the rubric #SaveNYC.

“What’s happening in the city now isn’t gentrification — it’s hyper-gentrification,” he said one day last month, brooding over coffee in a gentrified diner in the gentrified East Village, where he has resided, begrudgingly of late, for more than 20 years. “New York has traditionally changed organically: Italians move out, Chinese move in. But this is not organic. This is planned, it’s strategic. It’s the city government and major corporations colluding together to recreate the landscape.”

Mr. Moss is a consummate complainer, and when he talks about collusion, he is usually referring to decisions by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor (whom he hates), to hand out tax credits to real-estate developers (he hates them, too) or to offer easements to national chains like Whole Foods (which he also hates). He launched his effort in December with a pugnacious Facebook page that sought ideas on how to roll back Mr. Bloomberg’s policies and thus achieve his ultimate goal of saving “the soul of New York City.”

By early February, Mr. Moss had created a website, Savenyc.nyc, on which citizen activists have been posting pictures of the closed or threatened businesses in their own neighborhoods. Then came a Twitter feed, which he has used himself to announce events and to needle politicians (“@BilldeBlasio What are you doing to #SaveNYC?”).

But for someone who has launched a political campaign largely based on garnering publicity, Mr. Moss has taken great pains to protect his real identity. He is frugal with the details of his life, saying only that he is in his 40s and comes from Massachusetts. Like other anonymous crusaders — Batman, say, or Banksy — he claims he feels most comfortable acting under an alias: one that in his case blends a penchant for apocalyptic bombast with the crustiness of a curmudgeon.

A therapist and a writer, he says he is worried that clients might object to his activism.

“I also found that a pen name enables me to write with a freedom I don’t otherwise have,” he wrote in an email. “I mean a psychological or emotional freedom. I am less constricted.”

Today’s New York certainly offers ample opportunities for outrage, and Mr. Moss, who is easily incensed, has ranted in the past about subjects as diverse as Applebee’s, the High Line and Taylor Swift’s ascent as the city’s tourist spokeswoman. But with #SaveNYC, he is trying to move beyond his own indignation to channel public anger into a platform.

“One thing I learned from working on the Edison,” he said, “is that lots of people are angry, lots are complaining — they’re just not sure what to do. They don’t know that there are real solutions already out there.”

Among those solutions, Mr. Moss maintains, is the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, which was first introduced in the City Council in 1986 and is intended to provide commercial tenants with the legal means to negotiate rent disputes with landlords. While the bill was re-sponsored last year by Councilwoman Annabel Palma, a Democrat from the Bronx, and has the support of politicians like Gale A. Brewer, the Manhattan Borough president, who is also a Democrat, the real-estate industry opposes it. Nonetheless, Mr. Moss argues that by gathering an army of complainers — “A crowd is loud,” he said — he can get it passed as part of his broader agenda: to cap the number of chain stores in the city, to fine landlords who leave their storefronts empty and to create a special landmarks program that would seek suggestions from communities to preserve important cultural institutions, not just the buildings that surround them.

This essentially conservative approach to urban land management has drawn criticism from those who find Mr. Moss’s distaste for change elitist and counterproductive. Last month, The New York Observer wrote an unflattering article about him that employed the phrase “The Tyranny of Nostalgia.” Other publications, like The Economist, have argued that restrictive zoning laws constrain information-based economies in cities like New York.

But drawing on the work of the Marxist geographer Neil Smith, Mr. Moss has advanced a theory that today’s pervasive gentrification started in the 1990s as a revanchist assault on crime, disorder and general funkiness by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican. The terrorist attack of Sept. 11 deepened the city’s psychic need for security and comfort, Mr. Moss said, and by the time Mr. Bloomberg came to power in 2002, many residents were responsive to his vision of New York as a corporatized citadel of luxury and money.

That vision has persisted, Mr. Moss contends, despite the arrival of Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat. Just a few months ago, the Center for an Urban Future issued a study announcing that Manhattan alone now has more than 2,800 chain stores, a 10 percent increase since 2009. Over roughly the same period, the city has been flooded by a transformative tide of international capital, much of which has flowed into the upper reaches of the real estate market, crowding out affordable housing, Mr. Moss has argued, and leading to a general rise in rents.

While Mr. Moss has focused most of his tactical attention on city officials and real estate developers, his personal ire is frequently directed at what he calls Yunnies, or young urban narcissists. Yunnies are, by his account, the silent accomplices of hyper-gentrification: de-cultured millennials who actively like to shop at Target and could not care less if a quirky shrine like Bill’s Gay Nineties, which is the tavern where Tallulah Bankhead used to drink and which closed three years ago, is turned into a garish, high-end restaurant.

“People used to come here from their miserable lives in the suburbs to be queers, artists, oddballs,” Mr. Moss said, waving off the waitress’s offer of another splash of coffee. “But now we have this wave of young people coming in with their cellphones and their culture of bland, Middle American safety. If that’s what you want, why bother coming here at all? It’s like they brought the suburbs with them.”

Mr. Moss, it should be noted, also comes from the suburbs — even if he does not want to reveal which one. He insists, however, that his anger and his activism set him apart.

“I’m pretty cranky, but I also love the city,” he said. “I want it to be the best it can be, and I just don’t think that its best is a bunch of Olive Gardens, Starbucks and billion-dollar towers full of no one.”

By this point he had finished both his coffee and his complaining and stood to leave in his pageboy cap and pea coat. But before he walked away, he turned to add: “That would just be sad. We should all be incredibly cranky about that.”