Best 19 quotes of Jeremiah Moss on MyQuotes

Among locals, Avenues A, B, C, and D stood for Adventurous, Brave, Crazy, and Dead. (In 2016, writer George Pendle told the Times they now stand for "Affluent, Bourgeois, Comfortable, and Decent.

And in every afflicted city, the story is the same: luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture.

A neighborhood is an emotional ecosystem, and when it is destroyed by gentrification, it's trauma.

Being hated by America was good for the city, and good for America. Every family needs a black sheep.

Here is New York. This is why I stay. I stay to hear the jazz musicians playing in the parks, and to browse the tables of books for sale on the street. I stay for a drink in a quiet bar, lit by golden autumn light, and for Film Forum double features in black and white. I stay for egg creams, for the amateur opera singers practicing with their windows open so we all can listen. For the Chinese grandmothers dancing by the East River, snapping red fans in their hands. For the music of shopkeepers throwing open their gates. I stay for the unexpected spectacle, and the chance encounter, and for those tough seagulls gliding inland on rainy days to remind us that Manhattan is an island, a potential space both separate and connected. Most of all, I stay because I need New York. I can't live anywhere else, so I hold on to what remains. We've lost a lot, but there's so much left worth fighting for. And while I stay, I fight.

[Hyper-gentrification] is a man-made virus that grows rhizomatically, creeping into every crack and crevice of Manhattan, reaching ever deeper into the outer boroughs, pushing out whatever stands in its way. It can be defeated. But first we must pull back the curtain and see it clearly for what it is: an act of revenge.

If you take away just one thing from this book, let it be this: Hyper-gentrification and its free-market engine is neither natural nor inevitable. It is man-made, intentional, and therefore stoppable. And yet. Just as deniers of global warming insist that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to our world's climate, so deniers of hyper-gentrification say that noting out of the ordinary is happening to New York, and that its extreme transformation in the 2000s is just natural urban change. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the weather. I'm talking about the climate, and New York's climate has been catastrophically changed.

I missed it all, over a century of the best of New York, thanks to two uncontrollable facts of my birth: its year and geographic location. But we cannot choose our time or place, and i hurried to the city as soon as I could, unaware that the early 1990s was quite possibly the worst moment to get attached to New York. It was like falling crazily in love with a ninety-three year-old, too blind to see that she was fading. I was Harold and New York my Maude.

In this nightly scene, my neighbor is alone at his piano and I am alone at my door. Yet, in our private worlds, we are connected, participating in this moment together. It's these two seemingly opposite states---alone and connected---that hold me.

It's also a working-class city peopled by men and women who love with a tough love, in thick accents and no time for bullshit.

It's the ugly extravaganza of what New York, and too many other cities, have become---playgrounds for the ultra nouveau riche, orchestrated by oligarchs in sky-high towers, the streets stripped of its character, whitewashed and varnished until they look like Anywhere, USA.

New York is for people who need cities, for those who cannot function outside of one. Open and permissive, insulating you with the sort of anonymity you can't find in a small town or suburb, the city allows us to expand, experiment, and become our truest selves.

[New York is] the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.

Now that the neighborhood is nice enough for galleries there aren’t many artists left.

Reports of New York's death are not greatly exaggerated, though some would argue otherwise, insisting that the city's undomesticated heart still beats in far-off corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx, that you'll find a faint pulse in whitewashed Manhattan if you look hard enough. These insistent optimists, deep in denial, point to any trace of the old town and say, "There is New York." Yes, there it is. But it's only a remnant, a lone survivor from an endangered species rapidly vanishing.

The New York character coalesces. It's rough around the edges. Brusque and opinionated, it's also neurotic. Emphatic. It doesn't mince words. It says what it means and means what it says. Sometimes it says, 'Fuck you, you fuckin' fuck.

The scapegoats of the Giuliani era were people of color, the poor and working class, immigrants, feminists, homosexuals, socialists, bohemians. These people made New York the city it became in the twentieth century---open, progressive, diverse, and creative. They had also long been identified as enemies of the more conservative elites.

The ten most popular kids from every high school in the world are now living in New York City. Those are the people who most of us who came to New York came here to get away from.

When we think of New York, we most likely think of the twentieth-century city, the metropolis born from q confluence of restless, desperate people who arrived as underdogs and became the city's life force.