You don’t have to live in New York to find that a cookie-cutter nail salon has replaced a treasured longtime lunch spot, or plate glass storefronts have been papered to conceal suddenly empty interiors. Today, in this city and others as different as San Francisco and London, you walk down a familiar street, and, increasingly, there is nothing familiar. Moss’s book will tell you that this affects residents as “root shock,” a form of traumatic stress brought on when your world vanishes.
But the author’s purpose in broadening his influential blog, “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York,” into a book is, on the one hand, to detail key institutions and neighborhoods that have been wiped out, and, on the other, to pinpoint why this has been happening on the obliterating scale and at the accelerated pace of recent decades. Crucially, he combats two myths: one, that the myriad and gargantuan shifts are no more than the norm of a restless city, and, two, that these overhauls are just the result of market forces.
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