Magazine

For almost two years now, from his rent-controlled apartment in New York’s East Village, Jeremiah Moss has kept a list of bars, diners, cobblers, bookstores and other Manhattan mom-and-pop establishments that have disappeared, falling victim to rising rents, hungry developers or plain lousy business. The list, which Moss updates on his blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, is an elegy to the tin ceilings and dirty plate glass of a lost city. There’s the old Howard Johnson’s in Times Square and the Grand Luncheonette on the pre- Disney 42nd Street. There’s McHale’s Bar, Sophie’s Bar, Julius’ Bar, the Cheyenne Diner, the Sunshine Diner, the M&G Diner and a score of other neon-lit joints that didn’t have proper names so much as regular faces. They all vanished, many swallowed by the slick glass high-rises that seem to have landed on Manhattan over the last decade like spaceships in search of a planet to colonize.