Feral City

Like something out of a dystopian horror movie, most New Yorkers spent the year 2020 indoors, leaving the city streets mostly empties, the storefronts mostly shut. In large swaths of NYC, the neighborhoods felt abandoned, forlorn, empty, drained of the vitality of that makes this city great. 

But not everyone felt that way, specifically my NYC fellow blogger Jeremiah Moss Vanishing New York. 

He loves the fact that the city felt left behind. He loved that tons of rich people skipped town and left the city to us smallfolk. He loved that the people one often found on the streets were the freaks, the weirdos, the homeless, the vagrants, the people society mostly looks down on, the Others.

For a brief moment, it became their city.

This is not how most New Yorkers feel, of course. Crime went up sharply, (here and everywhere around the country), and we're still dealing with it. But Jeremiah, in a new book called Feral New York, offers a contrarian view, arguing that NYC in the worst of times was actually experiencing the best of times, that COVID was an unlikely gift to the least amongst us in the city. The gentrifiers were (temporarily) ceding their power, the "poetry of the streets" taking their place. 

The city became "feral" -- and Jeremiah dug that.

Of course, for people who lost jobs, for people who got sick, for people whose lives were completely upending and are stilling dealing with the aftermath, this thesis will be a hard sell. But it's an interesting take, nonetheless, an offbeat look at a very weird time, and what's more NYC than that?