Futurist mind have rarely been genial to New York City . In fact , writer and artists have spend the well part of two centuries destroy the Big Apple . Whether by flood or fire , nuclear explosionor alien invasion , New York more than any other metropolis support the brunt of our most apocalyptic future . And perhaps no historiographer understands this well than Max Page .
In 2001 , University of Massachusetts - Amherst history prof Max Page started piece of work on what was supposed to be a fun , light - hearted project . work on with the New York Historical Society , Page was assemble an showing proposal about the various ways New York had been destroyed in various works of fiction . He put the finishing touches on his proposal on September 10 , 2001 . Of naturally , the very next day real reality terrorists would put some of futurism ’s most fearful visions of devastation to shame .
eld later , Page realized that his geographic expedition of revelatory New York was still a worthwhile endeavour — it would only require a more reverent touch . His book , The City ’s End : Two Centuries of Fantasies , Fears and Premonitions of New York ’s Destructionwas published in 2008 .
I achieve Mr. Page by earpiece and ask him what it is about New York City . Why New York ? Why not Chicago , Los Angeles , Des Moines , Tulsa … what is it about New York that obligate us to see it destroyed in fiction over and over again ?
“ It ’s interesting because there are disaster phantasy about lots of dissimilar places . Los Angeles has got its part , especially in the flick world of the 20th century . And there ’s fantasies of Paris and London and Tokyo , of course . What I was struck with is that New York has remained the dominant focus for literally close to two one C , ” Page say .
“ It came to be the symbol of the city — not just the American city , but the metropolis itself — with skyscrapers in the early twentieth hundred . It remains the most important American city despite the rise of Chicago at one point in time , and Los Angeles and D.C. At least for economic science and for culture , New York is still the capital and has been , really from the 1830s onward , ” he say . As an Angeleno , I ’m reluctantly inclined to fit in with him .
“ And then , there ’s the childlike aesthetics . Destruction looks well in New York . ” Perhaps this is the real clincher . Aesthetically , New York is a gorgeous metropolis ; a city of brand and spyglass reach toward the sky in a decidedly 20th century American ode to modernism . But the wipeout of New York almost always has a purpose , political or otherwise . It ’s rarely just a jangling of the keys distraction or traditional disaster movie extravagance like in the screenshot from the 1998 moving picture Deep Impact above .
Take , for instance , the 1890 novelCaesar ’s Column : A Story of the Twentieth Centuryby Ignatius Donnelly . The story take place in the futuristic world of 1988 and New York is destroyed by a terrorist/”liberation ” group prognosticate the Brotherhood of Destruction . In this case , the devastation is political and hateful , as Donnelly ’s anti - semitism is plain when the Brotherhood states its purpose of destroying a Jewish - led oligarchy that check every aspect of New York life .
From Caesar ’s Column : “ The shops had all been broken into ; numb body lie down here and there ; and from time to time a burned block lifted its smuggled arms appealing to heaven . As we line near Union Square a wonderful tidy sum — such as the world had never before beheld — expanded before us . cracking blaze bonfires fall the body of work ; hundreds of 1000 had gathered to behold the ghastly structure , the report card of which had already disperse everywhere . ”
The retiring two centuries have seen New York destroy in an almost cyclical manner . fervidness , flood , monsters , gyration , foreigner , rinse , repeat . But there is one method of demolish New York that only come across rise in the mid-20th C : the nuclear bomb calorimeter .
Max Page explain to me the unique method acting of destruction brought by new technology as distinct from the more historically relatable stories of floods : “ The clime alteration film in 2004 , The Day After Tomorrow , that is partly about a flood . And then we have flood stories back in the teens and we have flood stories back in the late nineteenth century . Obviously some thing , like atomic calamity , is one of the main methods that obviously swear on Modern engineering . ”
This unexampled applied science was on spectacular display in the pages of Collier ’s clip in the 1950s . As I’vewritten about before , the August 5 , 1950 cover of Collier ’s displayed in intense detail a haunting mushroom cloud over Manhattan . The accompany article , instance by Chesley Bonestell , give a dyspnoeic report of an Associated Press newsperson on any - given - Tuesday who is trying to learn about the devastating demolition of New York City .
The uncomfortable fact is that there ’s something almost beautiful about these horrific visions . Divorced of the tangible world pain sensation and agony , we ’re string to the most powerful arm in the fantast ’s armory — nude , unapologetic spectacle . In fact , I have that Hiroshima issue of Collier ’s framed in my apartment justly next to a mid-1960s nuclear power propaganda pamphlet called “ The Atom , Electricity and You . ” It may be an achingly obvious put-on about the conflict between our concern and hope in futuristic applied science , but even strip of context these images are somehow objectively beautiful in their scale , esthetic and hubris .
Reveling in destruction is , of grade , a rather macabre occasion . Made all the more uncomely when such fantastic , unlikely devastation has reached our shoring . But we ca n’t help it . Watching the destruction of the Twin Towers was surreal , but not unimaginable . And of trend we could n’t look forth . I remember turn on the television on September 11th and see surreal images of the first Tower smoldering , while CNN talked with Tom Clancy over the telephone set . His 1994 novelDebt of Honorincluded a lineament who fly a commercial plane into the U.S. Capitol construction . biography was somehow copy the darkest of artwork .
Max Page explains , “ That mean solar day [ on September 11 , 2001 ] we had the good sense that we had seen this already in a motion picture . ”
Indeed we had . And we ’ll in all likelihood see it again in pic , telly and books for many generations to come .
This post earlier appeared atSmithsonian.com .
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