The City’s End Past and Present Narratives of New York’s Destruction

There were two phrases spoken over and over again on September 11, 2001, and in the weeks and months following: “It was unimaginable” and, in an apparent contradiction, “It was just like a movie.” The sight of the twin towers falling was, in fact, both: utterly incomprehensible for New Yorkers and Americans of today and, at the same time, wholly recognizable to our well-trained popular-culture imaginations. If the first phrase was an accurate accounting of our daily experience, the second was an accurate statement of what we see when we turn on the television or go to a movie. Americans have been imagining New York’s destruction for two centuries. America’s writers and image makers have visualized New York’s annihilation in a stunning range of ways. Imagining New York’s destruction has not been the purview only of artists and novelists, but also a common narrative, inscribed in the daily world of newspapers and television shows, computer programs, and music albums. The images are pervasive and disturbing, but largely unstudied. Looking back, into New York’s history, we need to understand how and why American culture has so readily and so creatively narrated the city’s end, before 9/11 and after. Cultural forms express and reproduce social experience. It might not be surprising, then, that a leitmotif of American popular culture of the last 200 years has been the imagining of New York’s destruction. The United States is a deeply religious nation; students of American history need constantly to be reminded that the United States remains the most religious of Western industrialized nations. The country has exhibited a strong apocalyptic strain that has not been hard to translate into popular culture. But these visions of the city’s destruction stem in part from the real, lived experience of New Yorkers—their lives and the life of the city have been powerfully and permanently shaped by very real destruction and rebuilding. The specific fantasies and premonitions of New York’s destruction have followed the fears of the city’s people. Some of those fears were built on real experiences—a series of natural disasters, as well as what I have called the city’s relentless creative destruction—that have led New Yorkers to believe that, despite the dominance of their city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mighty city is fragile.