The New End of Old New York

ED: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And we’re talking today about the history of Americans’ thinking about the future. Now recently, it seems like there’s been an onslaught of one particular vision of that future. One in which New York City is destroyed. In 2009, the movie, Knowing, depicted New York’s annihilation by solar flare. Before that, there was 2007’s I Am Legend, where Will Smith plays a man foraging through a desolate New York landscape.

ED: A year later, viewers pieced together the city’s demise, after the fact, in Cloverfield.

ROBERT HAWKINS: My name is Robert Hawkins. Approximately seven hours ago, something attacked the city. You found this—

ED: The list goes on and on. Sometimes, New York’s destruction is part of the whole world collapsing. But still, it’s New York that’s the focus on the silver screen. It’s safe to say that New York City has been destroyed more on film than any other American city.

PETER: This is not, however, a strictly recent phenomenon. We just came across a book called The City’s End that explores the very long history of destroying the Big Apple. So we invited its author, Max Page, to tell us what we should make of these visions of New York’s apocalyptic future.

MAX PAGE: There is a fascination with destroying New York City. There are so many thousands of varieties of destruction of New York fantasies in every single media that you can imagine. There are floods, and earthquakes, and scientific inventions, and bombs, and riots. It is that every generation has found a value in destroying New York.

The real launching of this genre begins with a huge influx of immigrants in the late 19th century. And that led to great fears about what that would do to the city.

I would say one of the most powerful early ones is called Caesar’s Column, and it was published in 1890. And it imagines an Italian, anarchist-led revolutionary movement to take over New York City from the wealthy Jewish oligarchs that had dominated the City. And the column in Caesar’s Column is a column of the dead millionaires of Fifth Avenue who were killed and piled up in the middle of Madison Square.

MALE SPEAKER: Chaos had come. The wagons rolled up half a dozen at a time and dumped their dreadful burden on the stones, with no more respect or ceremony than if they had been cordwood. The whole scene was awful.

MAX PAGE: This is one subgenre of people saying that New York simply can’t survive. That is, the mix of people, the inequalities, the mess, the disease, the degradation, is too much and that the only way to build a better future is simply for New York to be destroyed and move on.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MAX PAGE: After World War II, magazines, and books, and films are dominated for a while by the fear of nuclear disaster coming to New York City.

MALE SPEAKER: Standby. Reports indicate a fallout of radioactive particles carried by wind and rain as far as 70 miles from the city—

MAX PAGE: And one of the kind of poignant issues to me was that people just had no way of knowing exactly what it would do. We had now the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but what would it mean with the new more powerful bombs? And so there is this real tension between the real and the fantastical.

MALE SPEAKER: The play you about to see deals with an imaginary H-bomb attack on New York City and with the measure that civil defense would take in such an event for the rescue and perfection of the population in and around the city. It is the prayer of every one of us that such happenings shall forever remain fictitious.

MAX PAGE: But those fantasies never came true, thankfully. But what started to take over was not about fear of attack from outside, from a foreign invader, but rather, the urban crisis that we were creating ourselves. And starting in the late 1960s, and into the ’70s. And even into the 1980s, the city was physically falling apart, and crime was rising, and there was a sense that New York was destroying itself. And that theme became really reflected in a lot of popular writing and films.

One of the most—I think—most famous is Escape from New York.

ANNOUNCER: New York, 1997, the entire city is walled maximum security prison. The bridges are mined.

MAX PAGE: And this is a film from the beginning of the 1980s. It’s kind of taking what people thought of New York—as kind of like this dangerous site and kind of turned into a fantasy that finally we gave in to the disaster and said, OK, we’re just going to throw all the bad people, and just let them live there and fight it out, and put up a walls around the whole island.

One of the great ironies for me is that New York, though it was in a very bad situation—almost going bankrupt in the mid 1970s—despite that, it was not in as bad shape as other cities. And so that when they wanted to show an American city in total disarray, what did they do? They went to St. Louis. And they filmed a lot of this in St. Louis, which seemed to be in even worse shape than New York.

In the wake of 9/11, everyone from the Right to the Left predicted that we would have a change in our culture, less violence in general, and certainly, we would stay away from New York. That projected epic change in our culture lasted about three minutes.

ANNOUNCER: We’ve got traffic snarl-ups because the electricity is now out in almost every part of Manhattan.

MAX PAGE: You know, in 2004, a major film, The Day After Tomorrow, imagined both flooding and then a glacier in Manhattan. So with great gusto, they entered the climate change debate that was going on as part of that election year. So then they felt like the game was right back on.

I think it remains the city we both love the most and hate the most. It’s the—kind of—the symbol of the United States. So if you want to make a critique on where the country is, you show it through New York, whether it’s because there’s too much wealth inequality, because there’s too much moral decline. But underlying so many of the fantasies of New York’s destruction is a fear of losing the city. So I have always seen, or I came to see, really by the end of working on this book that so many of these fantasies were really just kind of odd love letters to the city. That we imagined the city being torn down. we imagined some of the great monuments, the fabric of the city being destroyed, because it’s one of our greatest fears in real life.

PETER: Max Page is a professor of Architecture and History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His book is called The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fear, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction.

ED: It’s time for another break. In your future, we’re predicting a story about a guy named George, his wife Jane, a daughter named Judy, and a boy named Elroy. Can you guess the maid’s name? BackStory will get back to the future in just a minute.