The City's End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York's Destruction

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Overview

Max Page examines the destruction fantasies created by American writers and imagemakers at various stages of New York's development. Seen in every medium from newspapers and films to novels, paintings, and computer software, such images, though disturbing, have been continuously popular. Page demonstrates with vivid examples and illustrations how each era's destruction genre has reflected the city's economic, political, racial, or physical tensions, and he also shows how the images have become forces in their own...
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More About This Book

Overview

Max Page examines the destruction fantasies created by American writers and imagemakers at various stages of New York's development. Seen in every medium from newspapers and films to novels, paintings, and computer software, such images, though disturbing, have been continuously popular. Page demonstrates with vivid examples and illustrations how each era's destruction genre has reflected the city's economic, political, racial, or physical tensions, and he also shows how the images have become forces in their own right, shaping Americans' perceptions of New York and of cities in general.
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Editorial Reviews

Wall Street Journal
An informative and provocative read.(Tama Starr, Wall Street Journal

— Tama Starr)

New York Times
Erudite but lavishly illustrated.(Sam Roberts, New York Times

— Sam Roberts)

Newsday
The City's End explores the imaginative and often profitable ways that filmmakers, writers, and artists have blown up, incinerated, drowned or depopulated New York City. . . . Page thoughtfully analyzes why the city's ruination has been such an enduringly popular theme.(Ann Levin, Newsday

— Ann Levin)

Wall Street Journal - Tama Starr
"An informative and provocative read."—Tama Starr, Wall Street Journal
New York Times - Sam Roberts
"Erudite but lavishly illustrated."—Sam Roberts, New York Times
Newsday - Ann Levin
"The City's End explores the imaginative and often profitable ways that filmmakers, writers, and artists have blown up, incinerated, drowned or depopulated New York City. . . . Page thoughtfully analyzes why the city's ruination has been such an enduringly popular theme."—Ann Levin, Newsday
The Barnes & Noble Review
In the aftermath of 9/11, New York has been treated to periodic threats from a wide assortment of pious lunatics, promising death and destruction to Gotham equal to 100 World Trade Centers. In City's End, Max Page beats them all walking away: chapter after chapter, the reader watches a city reduced to rubble magically regenerate itself with the turning of the page, only to be smashed to pieces again on the next -- though the devastation is usually confined to Manhattan between the Battery and 59th Street, few artists or directors having troubled themselves to imagine the effect of an ultimate ruction in, say, Park Slope, Brooklyn. The book records nearly instance of New York in ruins from film, radio, television, and fiction of the last two centuries. The authors of catastrophe range form Stephen Vincent Benét to Steven Spielberg, and their agents include -- but are not limited to -- fire, water, Germans, something called a wolven, Gene Hackman, and the moon. It's an extraordinary Domesday book of doomsdays, even if there's little methodology to its madness; this is a flat-out catalogue, illustrated throughout with prolapsed Statues of Liberty (seven in all) and ravaged Wall Streets (three), but Page doesn't sort through the wreckage long enough to find much meaning. What he does do, however, is commendable: like I. N. Phelps-Stokes' Iconography of New York in reverse, City's End is the definitive chronicle of New York's unmaking. --Ian Volner
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780300110265
  • Publisher: Yale University Press
  • Publication date: 9/28/2008
  • Pages: 280
  • Product dimensions: 7.30 (w) x 10.10 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

Max Page is professor of architecture and history, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a 2003 Guggenheim Fellow and author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, which received the 2001 Spiro Kostof Award of the Society of Architectural Historians. He lives in Amherst.
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Table of Contents

1 Beauty and Terror 1

2 "Horrors Were Their Delight": Terrifying and Thrilling Wars at Home and Invasions from Abroad 23

3 Utopian and Dystopian Fantasies of the "Stone Colossus" in the 1920s and 1930s 61

4 "Falls Rome, Falls the World": Atomic Fears of the 1940s and 1950s 101

5 Escape from New York: Fictions of a City's Decline and Rebirth 143

6 The Future of the City's End: New York and Its Fantasies After 9/11 199

Notes 233

Illustration Credits 261

Index 263

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