Jeremiah Moss is New York’s patron defender of all businesses old. It’s also a pseudonym and a character created as the persona behind Jeremiah Vanishing New York, the blog that has seemed to best capture and captivate New Yorkers’ anxiety over this moment of hypergentrification. The blogger had participated in a tradition of anonymity — until now. In the New Yorker, he has revealed himself as Griffin Hansbury, a psychoanalyst and social worker who found the pen liberating — or, as he tells the magazine, “if you took the crankiest part of me and isolated it, it would be him.” So why take off the mask? Hansbury has managed to build actual action out of his blog, including the #SaveNYC campaign, but his anonymity meant he couldn’t participate. While restaurants aren’t the only things Hansbury covers as Moss, they do make up a big part of his coverage. He launched a campaign to save the shuttered Cafe Edison, regularly celebrates old haunts and writes obituaries for “vanished” restaurants, and bemoans new and trendier places. Apparently, he just wants to hang out before everything is gone and all New York is left with are glass condos and rising tides. Oh, and he has a book coming out.
