Save NYC will have to be more inclusive, and he knows it. “Save NYC is not about old businesses and it’s not about nostalgia,” he told me. “I want to move beyond that. It’s really about having New York be full of businesses that are small and local.”
That means gastropubs, juice bars and yoga studios joining forces with butchers, bodegas and dive bars. When I suggested a parallel to the locavore movement, a kind of consumer consciousness aimed at shopping at local drugstores, groceries and so on, I could almost hear Moss wince through the phone.
I don’t think there’s one single answer to that. There’s a sense in which these notions of empowerment or disempowerment will always cut several ways, I think. You can’t discount that Twitter has, in that sense, made an opening for activists or for people who are marginalized, to let them have some kind of voice. On the other hand, traditional media powers—celebrities and politicians and intelligence agencies in the United States— they’re all also far more powerful and have far more of a reach on Twitter than any of us, even the most well-liked activists.
So even as we praise opportunities that open up for people to express themselves, we still have to acknowledge that behind all these things are very large companies partnering with other huge corporations—often very traditionally American corporations—and with government. The distorted belief that wealthy individuals and corporations are job creators has led to sizeable business subsidies and tax breaks. The biggest giveaway is often overlooked: corporations use our nation’s plentiful resources, largely at no cost, to build their profits.
There are several factual and well-established reasons why corporations owe a great debt to the nation that has made them rich. It was 1996, a flush time in the U.S. job market, and I landed a job at a financial newsletter. Having taken exactly one economics class in college, I knew the difference between a stock and a bond and macro- and microeconomics, but not much else. That I knew nothing about what I’d be covering—real estate investment trusts and commercial-mortgage-backed securities—didn’t bother my editors; they figured I could ask questions and write down the answers the way others before me had done. And that was what I did, often calling back annoyed bankers and traders two or three times for simple things that I had forgotten to ask the first time around. I hated what I was doing, which made it the perfect first job.
As for money, I was afraid of what it could do to you. This fear started young. It began in my childhood, which I thought about as I listened to the men of Tiger 21 play the humble game. When it came to beginnings, I, too, could trump the professor’s kid. I had started out fine—a father who inherited his father’s small-town businesses—but grew up terrified—bankruptcy, divorced parents, rented duplex that was robbed twice (including once by my only friend on the street), lousy neighborhood, and worse public schools. My childhood was framed by concerns about money and by extension safety and opportunity. We were probably poor, but we clung to that last rung of respectability and called ourselves lower-middle-class. If you listened to my mother tell the story, it shouldn’t have been like this. I was born to a family with money. And if money still flowed freely, we’d have had none of the problems we had then. But I don’t remember any of the things I would associate today with wealth. By the time I was two, the house, the one that meant everything to her but could fit inside my current home twice with room to spare, was gone, sold when my father filed for bankruptcy. That part is pretty much in agreement. The rest is murky. My father says he could have made a go of it in the construction, paving, and trucking businesses he owned had my mother been more supportive. My mother, who hasn’t talked to me in years, used to say it was my father’s fault for not working hard enough. I’m not inclined to side with either of them: I cut off my father for nineteen years, but today he has reappeared as a doting grandfather; and my mother, who I thought would be a wonderful grandmother, goes to extreme lengths to return Christmas cards I send her. I prefer the facts as I remember them.
My memory doesn’t start until I was about five or six. We were living in our third apartment since the house was lost. It was a nice apartment in a rent-with-the-option-to-buy town-house community—nice that is for Ludlow, Massachusetts, which is a town you wouldn’t have heard of unless you had to go to the bathroom around exit 7 on the Mass Pike. Ludlow’s a former mill town struggling to find industries to provide jobs. I don’t have good memories about the town or the people, but I may have grown up there in a time that was a lot better than the present. A childhood friend who still lives nearby said Ludlow was now one of the worst towns for heroin addiction in western Massachusetts. (The drug trade in my day—and this was a town where the dealers, not the buyers, lived—was mostly around pot.) We lived most of my childhood at 73 Motyka Street—our fourth apartment after the move. It was new, but new did not mean nice. Only one other duplex was between us and a subsidized-housing complex; I ran as fast as I could past it to and from the school bus stop. But from there, I got to go to the good elementary school—good being relative.
When I was ten, my parents split, and the divorce that followed knocked us down a bit more. I wasn’t thinking in economic terms then. I was too embarrassed that my parents were not together. I thought it was the defining moment of my life, and it was for a while. My years from ten until fourteen were bleak: I was on subsidized lunch; my clothes were shabby; and I was a participant in or observer of a bus-stop brawl about once a week. The only kids I knew whose parents were divorced were really poor, such as David’s mother, who had a live-in boyfriend and a premium cable-television package. (One way I knew we were not at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy was that we had basic cable; all the really poor kids had HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax, a truism I have never quite figured out.) David, my only friend in the neighborhood, robbed us, an event chock-full of upsides: one, he didn’t kill us with the knives he laid out on the kitchen counter, and two, by laying out those knives and rifling through my mother’s clothes in the basement, he scared the hell out of her and it was the reason we finally moved. I’ve always been perversely grateful to him. Within weeks, my grandfather gave my mother the down payment on a condo, and at sixteen, I moved into something we owned for the first time since I was two. That condo might as well have been a mansion. It made my mother so happy. I was thrilled to be in the clean, managed environment of a condominium complex in a town twenty minutes from where I grew up. That more cracked asphalt was around us than grass, and that our unit had paper-thin walls and a basement that flooded, didn’t matter as much as her owning it.
Life had been getting better for me for a couple of years before the robbery. I had a cousin who had gone to a small private school a couple of towns away, and my grandfather figured I was just as smart and should apply. He was confident that I would get financial aid to go. Fortunately, he was right. My life started to improve: better teachers, classrooms, activities, food. While other kids balked at the dress code—khakis, a navy blazer, and a white or blue shirt with a tie—it thrilled me: there was no way to know who was poor and who wasn’t.
Academically, I thrived. I also stopped worrying about money: my classmates at Wilbraham & Monson Academy were all richer than me, but I was able to differentiate myself in the classroom and the swimming pool. From there, I went to Trinity on financial aid and Chicago on a fellowship. My grandfather made up the occasional shortfalls in the funding of my education. A retired postman who owned his nine-hundred-square-foot house, he was from a generation that saved money and spent it only on what was needed. Without my knowing it then, he was the first person I knew who lived above the thin green line.