New Yorkers are accustomed to things disappearing. Every week, it seems, some beloved old diner, art-supply store, or punk den folds, to be supplanted by a CVS. (Latest heartbreak: Sunshine Cinema, on the Lower East Side.) Requiems follow. Then city life resumes, at its punishing clip. For the past ten years, a blogger going by the pseudonym Jeremiah Moss has refused to let go, grouchily chronicling each demise. The first entry of Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, in July, 2007, mourned the Greenwich Village speakeasy Chumley’s, which had closed after a chimney collapsed. When it reopened, not long ago, as a restaurant serving thirty-six-dollar cod, Moss was aghast. “The powers-that-be have body-snatched Chumley’s,” he wrote.

In 2014, Moss turned from elegist to activist, when he launched a movement to save the Café Edison, a show-biz canteen on West Forty-seventh Street. He started a campaign with the hashtag #SaveCafeEdison and organized lunch mobs, causing several hundred New Yorkers to swarm the place for matzo-ball soup. It closed anyway, but Moss kept the movement going, lobbying politicians with #SaveNYC tweet storms and staging a funeral for a doomed shoe-repair shop in the Empire State Building. Through it all, he obsessively hid his identity.

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Jeremiah Moss is now ready to unmask himself. He is Griffin Hansbury, a forty-six-year-old psychoanalyst and social worker. “It’s nerve-racking,” he said on a recent afternoon, sitting near Astor Place. He could have been mistaken for an undercover agent—black cap, sunglasses, red beard—were it not for a T-shirt that said “More Jane Jacobs, Less Marc Jacobs.” Hansbury grew up in Massachusetts. He first visited New York in 1978, when he was seven years old and accompanied his father, a clothing salesman, on a business trip. On his way to see “Annie,” Hansbury was enthralled by the “scruffy sidewalk buskers” in Times Square. In 1993, he moved to the city to get a master’s degree in creative writing at New York University and settled in an East Village walkup, where he still lives. (“It was just purchased by an L.L.C. behind an L.L.C.,” he said. “They want to get us all out.”) Back then, his favorite spots were Verchovyna Tavern, on Seventh Street (vanished in 2005), and the De Robertis pasticceria, where he would get pignoli cookies (2014). He looked at a spot on Astor Place where there used to be a parking lot. “There was a guy on the other side who sold pornography,” he said, wistfully. “He had a table of milk crates filled with vintage porn magazines.”

The biggest change in the neighborhood, he said, has been the demographic: punks and Ukrainians have been displaced by yuppies. Hansbury, who is transgender, was transitioning in the nineties, and he found a home in the downtown counterculture. Now, he said, “I feel alienated in my own neighborhood. It’s like a frat house.” He was feeling particularly glum in 2007, after writing a novel about a dyspeptic East Villager named Jeremiah Moss. When he started Vanishing New York, he didn’t give much thought to using a pen name, but he soon found that writing as Jeremiah was freeing: “If you took the crankiest part of me and isolated it, it would be him.” The novel was never published, but “Jeremiah” picked up thousands of readers, who sent in tips on endangered mom-and-pop shops. Hansbury said, “I’ve been writing and trying to publish since college, and having little to no success, and then this Jeremiah comes along and it’s, like, no problem.”

Hansbury decided to reveal himself, he said, so he can show up at his own rallies and on panels. Also, “Vanishing New York” is now a book. Walking down St. Mark’s Place, past a dark-glass building that he called the Death Star, he mentioned a study that measured pedestrians’ skin conductivity outside a sleek Whole Foods and on a more diversified street. “They found that blocks that are all this glass stuff actually shorten the lives of senior citizens, because they’re so depressing,” he said. He stopped at Gem Spa, a stalwart cigarette-and-candy shop, where he ordered an egg cream.

“How long has this place been here?” he asked the cashier.

“A long, long time,” the guy said. “Since the start of Manhattan.” ♦