Two contradictory phrases were spoken over and over again on September 11, 2001, and during the weeks and months following. On the one hand: “It was unimaginable.” On the other: “It was just like a movie.” The sight of the twin towers falling was, in fact, both: utterly incomprehensible and, at the same time, wholly recognizable. If the first phrase emanated from our daily experience living in relative safety in the world’s one remaining superpower, the second emanated from our well-trained popular-culture imaginations. By the millions, we have read books, watched movies, played games and found an electric thrill in watching the skyscrapers of Manhattan topple. Despite repeated observation that the events of 9/11 were unimaginable, our culture has been imagining and even rehearsing these events for decades.
America’s writers and imagemakers have pictured New York’s annihilation in a stunning range of ways: earthquake, fire, flood, meteor, comet, Martian, glacier, ghosts, atom bomb, class war, terrorism, invasion, laser beams from spaceships, torpedoes from Zeppelins, missiles from battleships, apes, wolves, dinosaurs, environmental degradation, nuclear fallout, “green death.” But what is ultimately more interesting is the social and cultural meaning of these images in the context of New York’s historical development. At each stage of New York’s advance over the past two centuries, visions of how the city would be demolished have proliferated across artistic mediums and popular forms of culture.
From the Ashes of Apocalypse
Many disaster novels and short stories simply assumed that in “World War III” New York, as the obvious target, would be instantly destroyed. Stories of how people survive in New York “after” were obviously central to the culture of the period. But what is striking about many imaginings of New York’s actual destruction or its post-apocalyptic appearance and social life is that the city remains a compelling magnet. While some journalists quietly asked the question, “Don’t you think Manhattan is expendable?” most rejected this attitude outright. The survivors of worldwide catastrophe still need to get to the city. New York, leveled and irradiated, is the place where the most important events are happening.
In the many post-apocalyptic stories and films, a stop in New York is required. In Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon”—a precursor to and influence on post-apocalyptic literature of the 1950s—the young man is pulled to the city; his father’s order to stay away propels him to find out the secrets of the Place of the Gods. The Godzilla-like character in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is drawn to New York. And in The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Harry Belafonte’s character makes his way from Pennsylvania to New York after a mysterious event that has killed virtually everyone.
Indeed, this was the attitude not just of individuals but of New York’s city builders. As Tom Vanderbilt has argued, in the years after New Yorkers learned of the effects of the atomic bomb, and then the hydrogen bomb, they began an era of building some of the most impressive modernist skyscrapers the world had yet seen. Lever House, the Seagram Building, the United Nations Secretariat Tower—all were built during the high point of the fear of nuclear attack, the most intensive civil defense debates, the bomb shelter craze, and the push to decentralize American business and homes. Furthermore, it is not as if these buildings were built “bomb proof,” as is occurring in construction since 9/11—for example, the bunker-like Freedom Tower at Ground Zero. Quite the opposite. While R. E. Lapp insisted that the “Achilles’ heel” of New York was its emphasis on building glass-encased buildings that would allow radiation in, New York’s architects and their clients went right on building them. In the decade following Lapp’s manifesto, New York built the most glazed city in the world. It was as if, in the face of Hiroshima, in the face of all warnings, in the face of the disaster scenarios in the movie houses, on television and in magazines, New Yorkers and their builders consciously chose to treat the products of popular culture as thrills and fears for entertainment. They most certainly were not to be treated as lessons that would lead to radically redesigning the city’s architecture or abandoning city life.
Paradoxically, then, the imagining of New York’s destruction by atomic bomb was a way to reassert the importance not only of the city but of urbanism more generally. While planners considered the threat of the atomic bomb an opportunity to press for decentralization and dispersal, others were resisting calls for change. They were seeing, either for the first time, or in a new light, the values of urbanism. Out of the crucible of the atomic bomb came a renewed defense of the idea of the city.
Fail-Safe
This about-face from the grim spectacles of the early 1950s emerged in 1964 in one of the most powerful films of the atomic age: Fail-Safe. Based on a 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler and set in 1967, Fail-Safe is about an accidental nuclear attack on the USSR by a Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber group. The error is technological, compounded by human fallibility and fealty to technology. The U.S. president—a Kennedyesque figure played by Henry Fonda in the film version—finds himself compelled to order SAC to blow up New York to compensate for the American mistake of destroying Moscow. The hope is that the destruction of New York and Moscow will result in disarmament and peace between cold war antagonists. Published in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, Fail-Safe reflects the sense of dread and inevitability of nuclear war, or at least nuclear accident.
When news of the mistaken bombing of Moscow hits, military leaders debate what should be done. Professor Groeteschele believes that nuclear war is survivable and requires calm action, as in any war. He accepts that New York must be destroyed, as “compensation.” But he insists that government and corporate documents be secured first to facilitate the rebuilding process after the devastation of the bomb. “Our economy depends on it,” he says.
The film is cool and detached in an intentionally harrowing way. The inspiration for the director, Sidney Lumet, was a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson, that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” Most of the film focuses on people in power sitting, or standing or staring, doing, it seems, nothing, because the “things”—nuclear bombs and malfunctioning computers—are in the saddle.
Amid the terror, and the waiting, some of the characters admit to thinking what is unutterable: that an atom bomb explosion can be beautiful. A young woman who meets Groeteschele after a party declares: “That’s the beauty of it [nuclear war]… there won’t be any survivors.” Groeteschele responds: “I’ve heard nuclear war called many things, but never beautiful.” “They won’t say it, but that’s what they feel.” This confession is followed later, in the Omaha war room, when a man looks up at the graphic board of the warplanes flying in formation toward their final destination and whispers, “Beautiful.”
After being cloistered for much of the film with the president in his tiny, windowless safe room, or in the control room with dour faces and television screens showing abstract movement of the bombers, viewers are suddenly released into the city. As the plane, with General Black on board, approaches Manhattan, ready to drop the bomb, brief scenes of New York street life flash on the screen: pigeons, children playing, people dancing on a stoop, cabbies arguing over an accident, the Playland amusement center in Times Square. All the abstract talk about destroying Moscow and New York, about saving documents for future generations, all of it disappears with the sight of New York—real, street-level, messy New York. Lumet seems to be surveying the joys of the city, emphasizing that what will be lost is not only individual lives, but the whole world of the city, what Lewis Mumford called the greatest of human creations. As the bomb drops, the screen flashes even faster, speeding through the images the viewer has just seen, with a grating sound effect. We see a small boy, and then a black screen. The film is over, save for a note from Columbia Pictures that this scenario is highly unlikely to happen.
Here Is New York
E. B. White’s essays for the New Yorker in the 1950s constitute perhaps the finest defense of American cities offered by any writer. In “Here Is New York”—originally published in Holiday magazine—White offers one of the most quoted defenses of the city. White begins this seemingly breezy essay on New York by surveying the types of people who inhabit the city—the lifelong New Yorker, the commuter, and then “the greatest of them all . . . the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.”
The joyous chaos that White loved, and which he so adoringly describes, is muted at the end of the piece, as White admits to an anxiety from living in the city at the dawn of the nuclear age, a fear which he shared with many Americans. In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, this part of White’s essay was widely distributed, as an almost uncanny prediction of that day:
The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
In this passage, White throws a cold shadow on an otherwise uplifting piece for a vacation magazine. He succinctly captures the reality of the time: New York had become vulnerable in a way it had never been before. A generation of crime and violence, fires, terrorism, brutal poverty and physical degradation had not been able to push New York off its trajectory as the “capital of capitalism” and the cultural capital of the world. But the bomb changed everything: the indestructible city was now mortal, as vulnerable as any other. Indeed, because of its density, its tall buildings, its importance, New York had become the most vulnerable of cities: the most attractive target, yielding the greatest physical and human damage and causing the greatest psychological pain. It suddenly seemed possible, for the first time, as E. B. White observed, that the city could be wiped away in a second. This reality gave the fantasies of the city’s end greater impact: you have to look hard at what you might really lose. Certainly there were powerful political purposes to the many disaster scenarios of the 1940s and 1950s, but a powerful undertone was the question of the value of the city: what would we lose if New York were to be no more? It was not a nuclear bomb that brought down New York, physically or otherwise, but rather a series of structural shifts that left the city in decay and virtual bankruptcy by 1975.
Fictions of a City’s Decline and Rebirth
One of the best examples of fortress New York comes in Escape from New York, one of several important New York disaster films of the early 1980s, when the city was already in urban despair. The film begins where Fail-Safe ends: with a radar view of Manhattan Island. This was a central fear of the nuclear age: that the city would become just a few diode lights on a radar screen, extinguished almost as easily as turning a switch. But in Escape from New York, we quickly see that this is not the radar of an attacking fighter jet but rather the federal government’s own monitoring equipment, surveying the federal prison called Manhattan in the year 1997. The entire island has been turned into a maximum-security prison, but a prison with no guards inside. The bridges and tunnels have been destroyed, making Manhattan truly an island once again. The president’s plane has crashed into the city, and the government needs someone to fly in and rescue him. Snake Plissken (played by Kurt Russell), a convict and ex-soldier, is offered his freedom in exchange for the safe return of the president. Just to be sure he doesn’t flee, he is wired with an explosive device that will be disarmed only when he returns with the president. Plissken floats a glider into the city, circling the mayhem and landing on top of the World Trade Center, solid as ever amid the destruction. The film takes him through the horrible streets of Manhattan, where complete anarchy, physical and social, reigns.
The motif of the walled city operated in a variety of ways. In Escape from New York, the federal government has chosen to isolate the Manhattan Island Prison with a huge “containment wall” that allows no one in or out. A similar notion plays out in a film that hit the theaters in 1982, 1990: Bronx Warriors, featured the Bronx patrolled by helicopter while its citizens—organized into vicious gangs—are prohibited from leaving. The pilot of a police helicopter watching the border expresses an extreme view of a popular disdain for the inhabitants of the most devastated borough: “If it were up to me, I’d clean the whole goddamn borough with napalm. Just sizzle ’em out of existence… Just be thankful we never have to go down there... scum of the earth… Lousy cockroaches think they own the whole fucking borough.”
But in some films and novels, the wall that separates the post-apocalyptic city from the rest of the world is invisible. In The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, Ralph hints at this when he wonders why no else has surfaced or returned. “I keep expecting everyone to come back.” Charlton Heston’s Detective Thorn, in Soylent Green, scoffs at the idea of leaving Manhattan: it is illegal to go to the country, and every other city is just like New York. In Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things, New York is an overcrowded, impoverished, and desperate city; no one can leave, though many seek a dangerous exit across harsh territory.
The city as a dangerous, degraded and diseased place needing a protective wall fit neatly with another prevalent theme: the death of the city through infertility. Catastrophe and romance seem indelibly linked.
The Italian-made After the Fall of New York (1983) opens with an African-American man playing a trumpet and a destroyed New York skyline in the background. “See?” he declares. “They baked the big apple.” The city has been decimated and is now a huge pile of waste and rubble under the control of the Eurac—half-man, half-ape—military force, which years earlier had come from “across the ocean” to foment nuclear war and contaminate the entire city. Gangs are everywhere and the streets are battlegrounds. There are few recognizable landmarks, save for the Statue of Liberty, which again stands as the symbol of lost glory.
In the 1970s a new set of environmental fears took hold. Earthquakes, destructive creatures, catastrophic weather—these were the long-standing themes of nature’s exceptional wrath and persisted in the late-20th-century New York destruction genre. But destruction of the environment—soiling our own nest—took greater hold on the imaginations of writers and filmmakers.
Urban Rebirth & Celebrating Destruction
In 1984, on the heels of countless movies portraying a physically and morally crumbling city of the present and future, came a new hit disaster film. In this film a band of unlikely saviors seeks the cause of the demons who are wreaking havoc on the city. But for those who know Ghostbusters, that description utterly misses the central humor of the film: it is a camp takeoff on a disaster movie, playing on the tropes of urban crisis and New Yorkers’ emotional need for heroes. The “ghostbusters,” a bumbling trio of geeky “parapsychology” professors (played by Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis) who have been dismissed from Columbia University, are called on to catch petulant green demons bent on causing mayhem in the city’s finest hotels and apartments. Soon they realize they have tapped into something much more dangerous: the city is threatened by an ancient Sumerian God named Gozer the Gozerian, who has found a home in a Central Park West apartment tower. After defeating Gozer, the trio manages one last bumbling act: they inadvertently unleash a new creature, following in King Kong’s path, to terrorize Manhattan’s streets: a gigantized advertising symbol, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Like all good creatures who invade New York, it pounds its way down the avenue, only to meet its end—in this case, melting into a sticky pile of marshmallow goo.
Set in a newly prosperous New York, the film makes clear it is not exploring the decrepit ruins of a declining New York. Ghostbusters celebrates the slimy green monsters as annoyances rather than true dangers to people and the city. The film lampoons the history of creatures attacking New York. Clearly, the fortunes of New York had shifted, and consequently, so had the tone of its disaster movies. From dark portraits of urban crisis in the not-so-distant future, American culture began offering in the 1980s and 1990s a new generation of disaster narratives, dedicated more to humor and entertainment than to warning.
By the early 1980s, when some of the classics of the urban-crisis genre hit the screens, the city had survived the worst and was about to enter two decades of robust economic development and resurgent wealth. One might have expected, then, a fairly dramatic shift in the nature of New York disaster scenarios, a sloughing off of the urban-crisis motifs of Escape from New York and other such films. We might even have anticipated a decline in the desire to imaginatively destroy New York, and a move to places more surely dystopic than this newly scrubbed, crime-free city. Los Angeles, the second city of disaster, does come into its own in this era, serving as setting for an increasing number of disaster films and novels. But what is striking is the persistence of disaster narratives in films and novels set in a New York City that seems increasingly safe from economic or even military disaster. Indeed, even as the millennium approached, and New York was arguably in the midst of its greatest, and latest, economic boom, American culture’s fascination with violence and disaster scenarios of all types—from police-chase television programs to animal-attack exposés to nuclear apocalypse movies—continued to grow, and New York remained a favorite venue. The obsession with destroying New York still pervaded every aspect of our culture. The ever growing number of New York disaster films and novels, as well as software programs, album covers, comic books and greeting cards, give the lie to the theory that destruction fantasies are simply a way for American society to “let off steam” by projecting a particular era’s fears onto screen, paper and canvas. The imagined destruction of New York was also—and especially in the last decades of the 20th century—an homage to the city that, phoenix-like, once again renewed and reasserted itself as the capital of capitalism.
The city’s resurgence was welcomed in two ways. First, the city’s newly cleaned-up sites—new skyscrapers, a clean and safe Central Park, buffed historic landmarks—found their way into a series of disaster films with traditional themes. There was a spate of assaults by invading creatures (Quetzalcoatl and the old standbys Godzilla and King Kong), as well as natural disasters (meteors and earthquakes), all of which came to happy endings. Second, although the images of New York as a crime-ridden city persisted long after its crime rate had fallen well below average among America cities, a new humor and campy engagement with urban disaster characterized the films of the 1980s and 1990s. Whether in the films Mars Attacks, Independence Day and Ghostbusters and its sequel or on the television show Futurama, the destruction of New York came to be meant for laughs. Right up to September 11, 2001, humorous images of New York’s fictional destruction pervaded American culture.
But just as that urban rebirth was skin deep—poverty and physical degradation continued to pervade many parts of the city, especially beyond Manhattan—so too the campy disaster film was only the surface of American culture’s engagement with New York. As the city approached the millennium, a new darkness in some New York disaster narratives shared screen time with the ebullient humor of others. Indeed, there was a new depth to the bleak vision of New York’s end in some films, fiction, and graphic novels. Moving beyond violent urban-disaster movies or science fiction films with happy conclusions, a set of works in the 1980s and 1990s seemed bent on breaking through the shield of escapist entertainment and invoking a new sense of fear and dread about the future of the city.
This is the stew that American culture was cooking as New York headed toward the new century, and September 11, 2001.
This is an excerpt from The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction.
America’s writers and imagemakers have pictured New York’s annihilation in a stunning range of ways: earthquake, fire, flood, meteor, comet, Martian, glacier, ghosts, atom bomb, class war, terrorism, invasion, laser beams from spaceships, torpedoes from Zeppelins, missiles from battleships, apes, wolves, dinosaurs, environmental degradation, nuclear fallout, “green death.” But what is ultimately more interesting is the social and cultural meaning of these images in the context of New York’s historical development. At each stage of New York’s advance over the past two centuries, visions of how the city would be demolished have proliferated across artistic mediums and popular forms of culture.
From the Ashes of Apocalypse
Many disaster novels and short stories simply assumed that in “World War III” New York, as the obvious target, would be instantly destroyed. Stories of how people survive in New York “after” were obviously central to the culture of the period. But what is striking about many imaginings of New York’s actual destruction or its post-apocalyptic appearance and social life is that the city remains a compelling magnet. While some journalists quietly asked the question, “Don’t you think Manhattan is expendable?” most rejected this attitude outright. The survivors of worldwide catastrophe still need to get to the city. New York, leveled and irradiated, is the place where the most important events are happening.
In the many post-apocalyptic stories and films, a stop in New York is required. In Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon”—a precursor to and influence on post-apocalyptic literature of the 1950s—the young man is pulled to the city; his father’s order to stay away propels him to find out the secrets of the Place of the Gods. The Godzilla-like character in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is drawn to New York. And in The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Harry Belafonte’s character makes his way from Pennsylvania to New York after a mysterious event that has killed virtually everyone.
Indeed, this was the attitude not just of individuals but of New York’s city builders. As Tom Vanderbilt has argued, in the years after New Yorkers learned of the effects of the atomic bomb, and then the hydrogen bomb, they began an era of building some of the most impressive modernist skyscrapers the world had yet seen. Lever House, the Seagram Building, the United Nations Secretariat Tower—all were built during the high point of the fear of nuclear attack, the most intensive civil defense debates, the bomb shelter craze, and the push to decentralize American business and homes. Furthermore, it is not as if these buildings were built “bomb proof,” as is occurring in construction since 9/11—for example, the bunker-like Freedom Tower at Ground Zero. Quite the opposite. While R. E. Lapp insisted that the “Achilles’ heel” of New York was its emphasis on building glass-encased buildings that would allow radiation in, New York’s architects and their clients went right on building them. In the decade following Lapp’s manifesto, New York built the most glazed city in the world. It was as if, in the face of Hiroshima, in the face of all warnings, in the face of the disaster scenarios in the movie houses, on television and in magazines, New Yorkers and their builders consciously chose to treat the products of popular culture as thrills and fears for entertainment. They most certainly were not to be treated as lessons that would lead to radically redesigning the city’s architecture or abandoning city life.
Paradoxically, then, the imagining of New York’s destruction by atomic bomb was a way to reassert the importance not only of the city but of urbanism more generally. While planners considered the threat of the atomic bomb an opportunity to press for decentralization and dispersal, others were resisting calls for change. They were seeing, either for the first time, or in a new light, the values of urbanism. Out of the crucible of the atomic bomb came a renewed defense of the idea of the city.
Fail-Safe
This about-face from the grim spectacles of the early 1950s emerged in 1964 in one of the most powerful films of the atomic age: Fail-Safe. Based on a 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler and set in 1967, Fail-Safe is about an accidental nuclear attack on the USSR by a Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber group. The error is technological, compounded by human fallibility and fealty to technology. The U.S. president—a Kennedyesque figure played by Henry Fonda in the film version—finds himself compelled to order SAC to blow up New York to compensate for the American mistake of destroying Moscow. The hope is that the destruction of New York and Moscow will result in disarmament and peace between cold war antagonists. Published in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, Fail-Safe reflects the sense of dread and inevitability of nuclear war, or at least nuclear accident.
When news of the mistaken bombing of Moscow hits, military leaders debate what should be done. Professor Groeteschele believes that nuclear war is survivable and requires calm action, as in any war. He accepts that New York must be destroyed, as “compensation.” But he insists that government and corporate documents be secured first to facilitate the rebuilding process after the devastation of the bomb. “Our economy depends on it,” he says.
The film is cool and detached in an intentionally harrowing way. The inspiration for the director, Sidney Lumet, was a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson, that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” Most of the film focuses on people in power sitting, or standing or staring, doing, it seems, nothing, because the “things”—nuclear bombs and malfunctioning computers—are in the saddle.
Amid the terror, and the waiting, some of the characters admit to thinking what is unutterable: that an atom bomb explosion can be beautiful. A young woman who meets Groeteschele after a party declares: “That’s the beauty of it [nuclear war]… there won’t be any survivors.” Groeteschele responds: “I’ve heard nuclear war called many things, but never beautiful.” “They won’t say it, but that’s what they feel.” This confession is followed later, in the Omaha war room, when a man looks up at the graphic board of the warplanes flying in formation toward their final destination and whispers, “Beautiful.”
After being cloistered for much of the film with the president in his tiny, windowless safe room, or in the control room with dour faces and television screens showing abstract movement of the bombers, viewers are suddenly released into the city. As the plane, with General Black on board, approaches Manhattan, ready to drop the bomb, brief scenes of New York street life flash on the screen: pigeons, children playing, people dancing on a stoop, cabbies arguing over an accident, the Playland amusement center in Times Square. All the abstract talk about destroying Moscow and New York, about saving documents for future generations, all of it disappears with the sight of New York—real, street-level, messy New York. Lumet seems to be surveying the joys of the city, emphasizing that what will be lost is not only individual lives, but the whole world of the city, what Lewis Mumford called the greatest of human creations. As the bomb drops, the screen flashes even faster, speeding through the images the viewer has just seen, with a grating sound effect. We see a small boy, and then a black screen. The film is over, save for a note from Columbia Pictures that this scenario is highly unlikely to happen.
Here Is New York
E. B. White’s essays for the New Yorker in the 1950s constitute perhaps the finest defense of American cities offered by any writer. In “Here Is New York”—originally published in Holiday magazine—White offers one of the most quoted defenses of the city. White begins this seemingly breezy essay on New York by surveying the types of people who inhabit the city—the lifelong New Yorker, the commuter, and then “the greatest of them all . . . the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.”
The joyous chaos that White loved, and which he so adoringly describes, is muted at the end of the piece, as White admits to an anxiety from living in the city at the dawn of the nuclear age, a fear which he shared with many Americans. In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, this part of White’s essay was widely distributed, as an almost uncanny prediction of that day:
The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
In this passage, White throws a cold shadow on an otherwise uplifting piece for a vacation magazine. He succinctly captures the reality of the time: New York had become vulnerable in a way it had never been before. A generation of crime and violence, fires, terrorism, brutal poverty and physical degradation had not been able to push New York off its trajectory as the “capital of capitalism” and the cultural capital of the world. But the bomb changed everything: the indestructible city was now mortal, as vulnerable as any other. Indeed, because of its density, its tall buildings, its importance, New York had become the most vulnerable of cities: the most attractive target, yielding the greatest physical and human damage and causing the greatest psychological pain. It suddenly seemed possible, for the first time, as E. B. White observed, that the city could be wiped away in a second. This reality gave the fantasies of the city’s end greater impact: you have to look hard at what you might really lose. Certainly there were powerful political purposes to the many disaster scenarios of the 1940s and 1950s, but a powerful undertone was the question of the value of the city: what would we lose if New York were to be no more? It was not a nuclear bomb that brought down New York, physically or otherwise, but rather a series of structural shifts that left the city in decay and virtual bankruptcy by 1975.
Fictions of a City’s Decline and Rebirth
One of the best examples of fortress New York comes in Escape from New York, one of several important New York disaster films of the early 1980s, when the city was already in urban despair. The film begins where Fail-Safe ends: with a radar view of Manhattan Island. This was a central fear of the nuclear age: that the city would become just a few diode lights on a radar screen, extinguished almost as easily as turning a switch. But in Escape from New York, we quickly see that this is not the radar of an attacking fighter jet but rather the federal government’s own monitoring equipment, surveying the federal prison called Manhattan in the year 1997. The entire island has been turned into a maximum-security prison, but a prison with no guards inside. The bridges and tunnels have been destroyed, making Manhattan truly an island once again. The president’s plane has crashed into the city, and the government needs someone to fly in and rescue him. Snake Plissken (played by Kurt Russell), a convict and ex-soldier, is offered his freedom in exchange for the safe return of the president. Just to be sure he doesn’t flee, he is wired with an explosive device that will be disarmed only when he returns with the president. Plissken floats a glider into the city, circling the mayhem and landing on top of the World Trade Center, solid as ever amid the destruction. The film takes him through the horrible streets of Manhattan, where complete anarchy, physical and social, reigns.
The motif of the walled city operated in a variety of ways. In Escape from New York, the federal government has chosen to isolate the Manhattan Island Prison with a huge “containment wall” that allows no one in or out. A similar notion plays out in a film that hit the theaters in 1982, 1990: Bronx Warriors, featured the Bronx patrolled by helicopter while its citizens—organized into vicious gangs—are prohibited from leaving. The pilot of a police helicopter watching the border expresses an extreme view of a popular disdain for the inhabitants of the most devastated borough: “If it were up to me, I’d clean the whole goddamn borough with napalm. Just sizzle ’em out of existence… Just be thankful we never have to go down there... scum of the earth… Lousy cockroaches think they own the whole fucking borough.”
But in some films and novels, the wall that separates the post-apocalyptic city from the rest of the world is invisible. In The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, Ralph hints at this when he wonders why no else has surfaced or returned. “I keep expecting everyone to come back.” Charlton Heston’s Detective Thorn, in Soylent Green, scoffs at the idea of leaving Manhattan: it is illegal to go to the country, and every other city is just like New York. In Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things, New York is an overcrowded, impoverished, and desperate city; no one can leave, though many seek a dangerous exit across harsh territory.
The city as a dangerous, degraded and diseased place needing a protective wall fit neatly with another prevalent theme: the death of the city through infertility. Catastrophe and romance seem indelibly linked.
The Italian-made After the Fall of New York (1983) opens with an African-American man playing a trumpet and a destroyed New York skyline in the background. “See?” he declares. “They baked the big apple.” The city has been decimated and is now a huge pile of waste and rubble under the control of the Eurac—half-man, half-ape—military force, which years earlier had come from “across the ocean” to foment nuclear war and contaminate the entire city. Gangs are everywhere and the streets are battlegrounds. There are few recognizable landmarks, save for the Statue of Liberty, which again stands as the symbol of lost glory.
In the 1970s a new set of environmental fears took hold. Earthquakes, destructive creatures, catastrophic weather—these were the long-standing themes of nature’s exceptional wrath and persisted in the late-20th-century New York destruction genre. But destruction of the environment—soiling our own nest—took greater hold on the imaginations of writers and filmmakers.
Urban Rebirth & Celebrating Destruction
In 1984, on the heels of countless movies portraying a physically and morally crumbling city of the present and future, came a new hit disaster film. In this film a band of unlikely saviors seeks the cause of the demons who are wreaking havoc on the city. But for those who know Ghostbusters, that description utterly misses the central humor of the film: it is a camp takeoff on a disaster movie, playing on the tropes of urban crisis and New Yorkers’ emotional need for heroes. The “ghostbusters,” a bumbling trio of geeky “parapsychology” professors (played by Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis) who have been dismissed from Columbia University, are called on to catch petulant green demons bent on causing mayhem in the city’s finest hotels and apartments. Soon they realize they have tapped into something much more dangerous: the city is threatened by an ancient Sumerian God named Gozer the Gozerian, who has found a home in a Central Park West apartment tower. After defeating Gozer, the trio manages one last bumbling act: they inadvertently unleash a new creature, following in King Kong’s path, to terrorize Manhattan’s streets: a gigantized advertising symbol, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Like all good creatures who invade New York, it pounds its way down the avenue, only to meet its end—in this case, melting into a sticky pile of marshmallow goo.
Set in a newly prosperous New York, the film makes clear it is not exploring the decrepit ruins of a declining New York. Ghostbusters celebrates the slimy green monsters as annoyances rather than true dangers to people and the city. The film lampoons the history of creatures attacking New York. Clearly, the fortunes of New York had shifted, and consequently, so had the tone of its disaster movies. From dark portraits of urban crisis in the not-so-distant future, American culture began offering in the 1980s and 1990s a new generation of disaster narratives, dedicated more to humor and entertainment than to warning.
By the early 1980s, when some of the classics of the urban-crisis genre hit the screens, the city had survived the worst and was about to enter two decades of robust economic development and resurgent wealth. One might have expected, then, a fairly dramatic shift in the nature of New York disaster scenarios, a sloughing off of the urban-crisis motifs of Escape from New York and other such films. We might even have anticipated a decline in the desire to imaginatively destroy New York, and a move to places more surely dystopic than this newly scrubbed, crime-free city. Los Angeles, the second city of disaster, does come into its own in this era, serving as setting for an increasing number of disaster films and novels. But what is striking is the persistence of disaster narratives in films and novels set in a New York City that seems increasingly safe from economic or even military disaster. Indeed, even as the millennium approached, and New York was arguably in the midst of its greatest, and latest, economic boom, American culture’s fascination with violence and disaster scenarios of all types—from police-chase television programs to animal-attack exposés to nuclear apocalypse movies—continued to grow, and New York remained a favorite venue. The obsession with destroying New York still pervaded every aspect of our culture. The ever growing number of New York disaster films and novels, as well as software programs, album covers, comic books and greeting cards, give the lie to the theory that destruction fantasies are simply a way for American society to “let off steam” by projecting a particular era’s fears onto screen, paper and canvas. The imagined destruction of New York was also—and especially in the last decades of the 20th century—an homage to the city that, phoenix-like, once again renewed and reasserted itself as the capital of capitalism.
The city’s resurgence was welcomed in two ways. First, the city’s newly cleaned-up sites—new skyscrapers, a clean and safe Central Park, buffed historic landmarks—found their way into a series of disaster films with traditional themes. There was a spate of assaults by invading creatures (Quetzalcoatl and the old standbys Godzilla and King Kong), as well as natural disasters (meteors and earthquakes), all of which came to happy endings. Second, although the images of New York as a crime-ridden city persisted long after its crime rate had fallen well below average among America cities, a new humor and campy engagement with urban disaster characterized the films of the 1980s and 1990s. Whether in the films Mars Attacks, Independence Day and Ghostbusters and its sequel or on the television show Futurama, the destruction of New York came to be meant for laughs. Right up to September 11, 2001, humorous images of New York’s fictional destruction pervaded American culture.
But just as that urban rebirth was skin deep—poverty and physical degradation continued to pervade many parts of the city, especially beyond Manhattan—so too the campy disaster film was only the surface of American culture’s engagement with New York. As the city approached the millennium, a new darkness in some New York disaster narratives shared screen time with the ebullient humor of others. Indeed, there was a new depth to the bleak vision of New York’s end in some films, fiction, and graphic novels. Moving beyond violent urban-disaster movies or science fiction films with happy conclusions, a set of works in the 1980s and 1990s seemed bent on breaking through the shield of escapist entertainment and invoking a new sense of fear and dread about the future of the city.
This is the stew that American culture was cooking as New York headed toward the new century, and September 11, 2001.
This is an excerpt from The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction.
