What'cha doin' downtown?

Born in 1952 in Queens, New York, Andy Shernoff has witnessed New York City’s decades-long metamorphosis first hand—as a ‘zine writer, a Lower East Side proto-punk, an elder statesman and witness to the aught years gentrification, and, of late, as a Hudson Vally escapee peering down from above the fray.

I won’t dare to take on the merits and demerits of gentrification here, in so modest a space, yet what’s clear is that the metamorphoses of New York City in the last three or so decades has fundam...