Vanishing City Bloggers

Patrick Hedlund of The Villager interviews "savvy bloggers" me and Brooks of Lost City for their Mixed Use column this week. Check out the complete article here and here's an excerpt:

The brains behind Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York and Lost City consistently update their metro-centric Web sites with original news about neighborhood openings and closings, and commentary on the city’s ongoing evolution, with an overriding sense of mourning for the New York of yore.

"Unfortunately, there’s always stuff to write about,” said Lost City blogger Brooks of Sheffield, who, as a working journalist by day, uses a pen name for his site. “These places are treasures, and once they’re gone, they’re irreplaceable.” Lost City, which recently chronicled the changes — or, as Brooks found, lack thereof — on the Lower East Side’s Ludlow St. over the past decades, often breaks news that feeds some of the city’s larger real estate media, such as Curbed.com and the big dailies.

The same goes for Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, whose proprietor Jeremiah Moss — also using a nom de plume — offers “a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct,” according to the banner atop his site.

“When you have a blog that just accumulates so much, you realize just how truly overwhelming it is,” Moss noted of his aggregated posts, which number more than 300 since the site’s launching less than a year ago.

Moss first reported the recent closing of the Cheyenne Diner, which later appeared in the pages of the New York Post and The Villager’s sister paper, Chelsea Now, as well as on a handful of other Web sites. J.V.N.Y. was also first to break the news about the likely loss of eight businesses on Ninth Ave. following a large real estate deal.... “I’d like to see a city in which everybody can have a niche and survive,” he said. “I don’t want everything to be the same, and I feel like that’s what we’re moving to."

*For more savvy NYC bloggers, please take a visit down my links list--we're all helping each other by sharing info, tips, and eye-opening posts on the state of our vanishing city.*