Moss arrived in New York at 22, in 1993, “the beginning of the end,” as he tells it in “Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul,” his comprehensive, emotional exploration of the historical, economic and social forces that have permitted and in many cases encouraged things to play out so dismally. What does it mean, or really why does it matter, for New York, or any city, to have its character or “soul” go missing? The essential pain is not in the disappearance of wherever it was that used to serve the best 3 a.m. souvlaki (Moss feels that pain viscerally and often too indulgently), but in the transformation of the city into a place that no longer accommodates failure, a place that disavows mediocrity in the human form — defined now as the person without the big job, brilliant kid, sweeping view, outsize network — while all too willingly embracing any aesthetic expression of the average (this chain store, that grotesquely bland glass high-rise). “A city once famously neurotic is becoming malignantly narcissistic,” Moss writes, in one of many descriptions that sum up the state of affairs with an efficient wisdom. New York, in its current dissonant form, is at ease with a disturbingly paradoxical identity, as a place that says yes to every branch of Dunkin’ Donuts and no to the people whose fortunes consign them to working there.

In the comparatively quaint days of the 1980s and ’90s, gentrification referred to the ways in which neighborhoods changed at the hands of largely well-meaning renovators who slowly remade their brownstones. Today we have “hyper-gentrification,” something far more insidious, and this is what concerns Moss most — the complicity between municipal government and big private money to reconfigure whole sections of a city, with dubious consequences, chief among them the ceding of space, goods and social currency from the ordinary classes to the ruling order.

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The phenomenon is best exemplified in the upending of the far West Side of Manhattan from Midtown on down, which Moss chronicles in rich, methodical detail. Twelve years ago, with the support of those who backed the High Line, the elevated rail track turned into a glistening public park (and a model for abandoned industrial land around the country), the city allowed property owners along the route to sell air rights. Those developers who paid for certain amenities to the park could build their towers even higher. Small businesses disappeared; ultraluxury condominiums followed, in some cases directly adjacent to public housing complexes whose residents lost many of the stores that serviced them. But the city’s mission was accomplished: a corridor to Hudson Yards, an entirely manufactured, high-end science-fiction neighborhood just north and under construction — “the cold artificial heart of new New York,” as he calls it — was established.

The pleasure (or agony, depending on your predilection) of reading Moss is his purity. Many of us groan about the evisceration of the city’s industrial past while spending no shortage of time complaining about the impossibility of getting a reservation at the new waterfront place, in a converted warehouse, in Brooklyn, with the great vitello tonnato. Moss doesn’t care about vitello tonnato; he only wants the sub. He begins no thought with “on the other hand.” For Moss there is only one hand, and it is the hand of menacing greed and self-interest. His contempt for tourists and transplants who don’t abide the old folkways is uncompromised — young people show up to get drunk and defile the East Village, never to teach poor children in Brownsville. This aversion to any hint of ambidextrous thinking can leave him ignoring the sort of enviable reincarnation accompanying some of the deaths he mourns so dramatically. Interviewing a second-generation stable owner and manager of horse carriages popular in Central Park, a man “in a scally cap … pink-cheeked with heather gray eyes,” Moss and his subject grieve the impending extinction of the trade on West 37th Street at the hands of developers, neither of the two registering that the man, owner of a building bought in 1979, now highly coveted, has been put in the position of potentially making many millions of dollars.