New Yorkers who remained in the city during the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic are likely to remember a frightening, desperate time of rampant panic-buying, long lines at food banks, rumors circulating like wildfire—and, underlying it all, rapidly increasing numbers of illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths. Trapped in our apartments, we felt cut off, afraid to see friends and family, not knowing when we could safely return to our lives. The authorities, visibly unsure of themselves, appeared unable to respond to the multiple crises facing the city. As the streets emptied of people, an eerie, apocalyptic feeling set in. At least for a short while, it felt like the world might be coming to an end.
Jeremiah Moss’s recent book, Feral City, presents a very specific perspective on this period—that of a middle-aged East Villager who, for nearly two decades, has chronicled—and lamented—the loss of his neighborhood’s unique Bohemian character, first as a blogger and now as an author. Moss writes about the salutary effects of lockdown, which, in triggering the exodus of Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s wealthiest residents, restored New York to the “rough and disorderly” place it was in the 1990s, the halcyon days of his youth. As though they had been trapped under rubble for twenty-five years, suddenly “deviants,” “homeless people,” and “the Black, trans, poor, and other Others” emerged to reclaim their right to the city. In this less regulated environment, it once again became possible to do many things that had apparently been unthinkable as late as February 2020: ride your bicycle in pedestrian zones, scream curse words in the street, wear loud pink clothing. Through the summer and fall, Moss ventured outside, witnessing the rebirth of the kind of urban street culture that ignites his imagination and ultimately discovering that the old, gritty New York had not died after all.
Fans of Moss’s blog, Vanishing New York, and his first book of the same name will enjoy his brief vignettes, which bring to life quirky scenes from around the neighborhood: early morning garbage collectors blasting Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft” from their trucks’ stereos or a Harold Ramis look-alike shouting baby noises at a woman carrying a stack of pizza boxes. Those who experienced lockdown New York will also recognize the beauty that Moss finds in that strangely quiet and deserted place, where one could slow down and listen to “a tugboat’s horn resounding from the East River” and where “every day, every hour, [felt] like Sunday morning.” These, however, are among the few pleasures that the book affords its readers. Like Vanishing New York, Feral City is both a polemic and a requiem for an urban landscape that has become glitzified and managed beyond recognition. But where Moss’s first book was inspired by a palpable love of local gathering spots and the subcultures that they anchored, the follow-up is a bitter and confused assault on the people that he blames for taking it all away.
WHO KILLED NEW YORK? For Moss, the answer is simple: it’s “the normals” (a group that he also calls “hyper-normals” or “New People”). They are all young, white, and, presumably, wealthy transplants from the suburbs who began populating certain precincts of Manhattan sometime after 9/11 and have now remade much of the city to both suit their “bland” consumer tastes and accommodate their obnoxious behavior. They are the packs of bros who prowl the East Village with bags full of golf clubs and girlfriends, “dressed in athleisure and pristine white sneakers,” who clutch matcha lattes, grain bowls, and iPhones as they shuttle between yoga classes and brunch spots. These youngsters are loud and thoughtless. They refuse to give up space on the sidewalk. They can’t unglue their eyes from their screens. Unforgivably, they “do their laundry every day.” (One wonders how exactly Moss knows this.)
In order to elevate his complaint to the status of something more serious than fashion crimes or minor infractions of whatever rules apply to New York City pedestrians, Moss cooks up a psychological profile of the hypernormal as “a new type of person, fiercely devoted to the normative order.” Their loud laughter is not just annoying; it is the kind of laughter “deployed by aggressors.” Their refusal to make space on the sidewalk is not just absentmindedness—it’s not even deliberate rudeness. Rather, it is evidence of “contemptuous disregard” and an inability “to see the humanness of others.” Brandishing his credentials as a psychoanalyst while firing off bite-size quotations from an armada of authoritative scholars and clinicians, Moss drive-by-diagnoses the loathsome normals: they exhibit clear signs of borderline personality disorder and projective identification; they are “tightly compressed knots, blank spots inside buzzy clouds of agitated distraction,” blithely unaware of their alienation from themselves. Not content with dissecting their character structure, Moss ratchets up the charges, claiming that these “New People” have been dropped into his neighborhood for the purpose of policing the behavior of others. Make no mistake, they are there for a political reason: to “keep the deviance of the city under wraps.”
The primary target of Moss’s rage is the Influencer, a twentysomething social media maven who lives on his floor. Moss’s obsession with this young woman is concerning. He relentlessly tracks her Instagram account. He spends much of his time monitoring her comings and goings through the peephole in his front door, eavesdropping on her conversations. He follows her. He takes her discarded items from the trash (explanation: “I know everything inside the apartment because [she] has shown it all on Instagram”). He photographs her from his window. He fantasizes about breaking into her apartment so that he can use her washer/dryer. He prints all of this in a book, apparently feeling justified. We are supposed to sympathize with Moss. He is a victim. He suffers from irritable bowel syndrome and sciatic nerve pain—all on account of the Influencer and her horrible friends. He has to ask her to keep the noise down during a party. (She apologizes, lowers the volume, and offers him baked goods.) He has to step over her Amazon packages when exiting or entering the building (“kick, kick, kick!”).
Lest you think he might possibly be overreacting to his neighbor’s mere existence, Moss explains that he has a problem with “what she represents.” “The way she embodies hyper-normativity so perfectly,” he explains, reminds him of “the thing that the world tried to force [him] to be.” That is, a mindlessly consuming conformist. Reaching back into his own biography, Moss, who is trans, reveals that he himself once aspired to be “a smooth and golden Mayflower WASP,” shedding his “gold chain and working-class accent” and making “pilgrimages to L.L. Bean.” But, unlike the Influencer, who has caved to Society, he had the strength to overcome the seductions of normality. A more charitable person might draw from Moss’s example a message of redemption. Is the Influencer doomed to be “hyper-normal” forever, or could she change? Are the normals as one-dimensional as Moss believes them to be, or are they more complex and internally conflicted than he allows? To ask these questions would be to obscure the categories that underpin his moralistic worldview.
THE HEROES OF FERAL CITY are the real New Yorkers—those who emerge to revivify the city once the tyrannical reign of the normals has been (temporarily) suspended. They avenge themselves on their overlords by “taking space,” shaking their asses, using filthy language, and idling in parks. Moss seeks out their company, flaneurishly observing and participating in their uprising against “the normative order.” When stores are looted, he is on the scene, cheered by the destruction of Lululemons and Starbucks. He dutifully joins the Black Lives Matter marches, using his bike to block traffic. Most of all, he attends nightly dance parties in Washington Square Park. In these moments, he notices that the people he is with, who are the exact opposite of the normals in every respect, are not concerned with how they look, nor do they stare at their phones or avoid eye contact. Instead, they “look at one another,” making him feel “more human, less alone,” appreciated, seen. An authentic community, they exemplify the “organic order of human nature when it is not alienated from itself and others.” The pandemic has scared away the New People, offering a utopian glimpse of the rebellious energy pulsating beneath the city’s sterile veneer.
It is difficult for the reader to share Moss’s sense of euphoria. His sentimental, often lachrymose account confers a Whitmanesque grandeur on scenes that come off as very ordinary. Each pleasant interaction with a stranger is a “moment of intimacy,” and seemingly every haphazard gathering (of the right people) is a “collective moment of wild togetherness.” Being recognized at a demonstration by someone he met at an earlier demonstration means that he is “cared for and connected.” In the absence of any sustained description of actual human relationships, we are left with a tragicomic portrait of a narrator who seeks validation from everyone who crosses his path.
Moss’s idea of rebellion is equally hollow. What he, armed with Theory, alternately dresses up as “queer negativity,” “hauntology,” or defiance of the “disciplinary society” is manifestly thin gruel. Salvaging junk from the sidewalk, rather than letting it end up in a landfill, is a transgressive anticapitalist practice. Playing a boom box, spraying graffiti, biking on the sidewalk—all of these “anti-productive” activities constitute “a wrench in the works.” Because the “injunction to smile” is enforced by “the heteronormative, capitalist” order, even just being an asshole is a form of everyday resistance. Like an angry adolescent, Moss “want[s] to throw a brick”—but doesn’t. He channels his anger into a weekly bike ride to different restaurants around lower Manhattan where, in the righteous company of his fellow activists, he chants, “FUCK YOUR DINNER!” at those who have the gall to dine alfresco while the world burns. This practice has the double function of compelling the targets “to know what they don’t want to know, to see what they refuse to see”—whatever that is supposed to mean—while exposing the function of the police as protectors of “consumer pleasure.” Here, as so often happens in Feral City, the different threads that Moss has crudely woven together easily come undone. Are the diners normals or do they fit into some other category of undesirables? Is eating at a restaurant a form of complicity with George Floyd’s murderers? Were the BLM protests about rescuing New York from cultural banalization, or was there more at stake?
THREE YEARS ON, it is increasingly evident that the pandemic reshaped New York City in profound ways, none of which register in Moss’s memoir. Commercial real estate has taken a nosedive, as many professional class workers can now Zoom from home. Brick-and-mortar shops have closed, while more and more business moves online. The streets and sidewalks are now flooded with the e-bikes and scooters of app-based delivery drivers. Ridership on public transit, meanwhile, remains far below prelockdown levels. Some of these changes have made life more convenient, depending on whom you ask, but at a cost. Much of the city’s social fabric has abruptly dematerialized into the digital ether.
By no means should we shrug at the decline of the kind of vibrant urban experience that Feral City both mythologizes and eulogizes. Moss is right to identify this as a problem and even to define the problem in political terms. At its core, Feral City purports to be about gentrification and the right to public space. And yet, the book has absolutely nothing to say about real estate developers, predatory landlords, undertaxed billionaires, corrupt public officials, dysfunctional government agencies, or grifting nonprofits. In Moss’s world, there are no elites, only normals. (In a typical aside, Moss fumes that influencers like his neighbor are “a valuable commodity” who “help to increase gentrification and raise commercial rents” but fails to mention the other players in that process.) Seemingly anything that is wrong with New York can be laid at the feet of the New People, who are neither a class nor a coherent demographic, but a cultural stereotype. To recover a more democratic and less administered city will require something other than “the ritual display of the vagina” before a crowded crosswalk or flipping the middle finger at your local Sweetgreen. It will require taking on the much more difficult, slow, and perhaps normal task of changing how power and resources are distributed among this city’s more than eight million residents. Maybe it starts with talking to that next-door neighbor you love to hate.