The similarities are striking

I read this blog called Jeremiah's Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss, and it just came to light that Jeremiah is really Griffin Hansbury, who had been using the pseudonym of Jeremiah Moss for the 10 years he's been publishing Vanishing New York. He was interviewed by the New Yorker here.

But that's not the point of this post. It has to do more with our similarities. Griffin is unhappy with the constant changes in New York City, he moved into the East Village, felt comfortable and at home there but as we know, the East Village is one of the most gentrified areas of NYC and it's an ongoing thing that keeps morphing.

I of course, feel the same about Coconut Grove. But I didn't start the Grapevine to bitch and moan, although it has turned into the Gripevine to some people over the years. 

Griffin feels that Vanishing New York blog has served its purpose and one reason is that the competition often beats him to the punch. I feel the same about the Grapevine. There is not much to write about these days and as for being beat to the punch, my complaint has always been that I beat other publications to the punch, then they take the stories, re-write them and make them their own. 

As for being anonymous, my first year doing the Grapevine I was anonymous, but not for any other reason than that I grew up in the newspaper biz and the story was the thing, not the editor. I didn't really think it was important as to who was writing the news, the news was the thing. I only revealed myself because I tried to encourage commenters to not be anonymous and how could I expect that of them if I was anonymous.

Griffin used to post twice a day, five days a week in Vanishing New York and he will lighten his load now. I, believe it or not, would publish seven days a week up to 7 to 10 stories a day for a number of years! That was up to 70 stories a week, all based in 33133! I don't know how I did it, but I was strict about keeping all stories about Coconut Grove. The archives hold about 13,000 separate posts!

I lightened the load over the years, not because of the work, but I found that if people didn't read the Grapevine daily, they would miss most of the stories. The stories were moving and posting too fast and people couldn't keep up with them. Friends would ask me, "Did you hear about such and such." And I would say, "Yes, I posted that last week." Or they would ask, "Did you hear about this and that?" And I would say, "Yes, I posted that last Tuesday," and so on. So I realized I should not break my back posting stories that people weren't seeing and I lightened the posting frequency.

Anyway, like Griffin, I would like to make changes. I guess I'll publish stories when I have them, which seems to be daily, but may not always be. I do seem to come up with something on a daily basis, so we'll see.

Anyway, I just thought there was such a parallel between Vanishing New York and the Grapevine that I thought that it was interesting.