Magazine

Max Page’s monograph, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction, begins surprisingly with a personal confession: as a college student in the late ’80s, the author enjoyed loading up Microsoft Flight Simulator on his PC and flying his plane into the World Trade Center. Apparently, he wasn’t alone. Three days after September 11th, when Microsoft announced that it would eliminate the World Trade Center from its 2002 version of the game, fans came out of the woodwork to confess that crashing into it had been their favorite part of the game.

Curious why destroying New York is such a common fantasy, Page examines the last 200 years of its fictional obliterations, from pulp fiction novels of the 19th century, to the radio and television broadcasts of the 20th, to today’s computer games. After this catalogue of catastrophe, Page concludes that other than a universal secret penchant for “disaster porn,” New York’s annihilation has no singular allure. Rather, our reasons change with the times. During the Gilded Age, class war ravaged New York; during the Cold War, the Russians nuked it; in the ’70s, the city imploded from crime and racial tension. Tell Page the method, and he will tell you what fears are preoccupying America.