'Vanishing New York' Author Steps Up the Cynicism with New Blog 'The Grumbler'

The author of Jeremiah's Vanishing New York recently launched a new blog, The Grumbler

The Grumbler

By Patrick Hedlund

DNAinfo News Editor

MANHATTAN — What’s a local blogger to do with so much frustration over New York’s changing landscape and only one outlet to express it?

For the author of the website Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York — billed as “a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct” — the answer is to start a new blog to handle the spillover from reporting on Manhattan’s transformation from gritty to glam.

The Grumbler, the new online effort from Vanishing New York founder Jeremiah Moss, will opine on a broader range of complaints.

Where JVNY became a digital community newspaper of sorts — chronicling the comings and goings of retail establishments in Manhattan’s newly gentrified neighborhoods — the Grumbler will address bigger issues through the same, cynical lens.

The new blog will focus on topics like “the future of print publishing, the alienation of new technologies, my ambivalence about the future, consumerism, as well as larger social and cultural issues,” Moss said by e-mail.

“One of my motivations behind the Grumbler had to do with the ways in which, over time, I had diluted the original ‘mission’ of JVNY, which began as a personal outlet, really, to preserve memories of the city and also to have a space in which to voice a part of me that was angry and powerless over the rapid, large-scale losses to New York,” said Moss, who writes under a pseudonym and has tallied more than 1,300 blog posts since starting the site three years ago.

It began with posts mourning the loss of longtime Manhattan institutions, like the Howard Johnson’s in Times Square and Chumley’s tavern in the West Village. From there, JVNY expanded its audience and breadth of coverage to a wide range of local stories, including debates between bar owners and community boards, battles over street art, and neighborhood characters.

“The more I wrote, and connected with people, the more I wanted to write, and I found that I was straying from topics within the theme of ‘vanishing New York,’” Moss said. “I have felt conflicted about that. So it has long seemed necessary to have a place to put ‘the other stuff’ that I was thinking about and wanting to write about.”

The “other stuff” includes a recent takedown of a new interactive billboard in Times Square that captures images of passersby, marking “another blow to our public privacy,” he wrote.

“I don't know if anyone wants to read any of this stuff from me — probably many people won't — but I see the Grumbler as something small, with an even smaller audience than JVNY, just a place to catch the run-off, so to speak, of my thoughts, much of which is in the complaint department, but not all.”

Managing two blogs will be no small task for Moss, who works a day job and does not draw profits from his online ventures. He sees the blogs as a way of “managing my multiple selves, which we all have, of course.”

“We all contain multitudes, it's part of the human condition, and we each figure out what to do with those multitudes,” he said. “Keep them separate, merge them, cut them off. I guess, right now, I blog with them.”