With all the body blows the New York City financial services industry and
its attendant handmaidens (BigLaw, that would be you) have taken in the past
couple of months, it may be time to remind ourselves that for the past two
centuries or so, ever since New York’s emergence as the pre-eminent American
city, there has been a vibrant tradition of imagining the Apocalypse descending
upon Sin City.
Indeed, one of the earliest published screeds railing against New York came in 1812 when Nicodemus Havens warned (hoped?) that the city would be "consumed by the ‘devouring tide’ of God’s wrath. ‘Whole families were enclosed within its horrid grasp,’ Havens wrote, ‘and whole streets in this flourishing city, swallowed together.’" We learn this through the WSJ’s review of Max Page’s The City’s End.
Just in the past week we have been reminded of how virulent, deep-rooted,
and widespread is animus towards Wall Street, which, judging by the rhetorical
lightning-bolts flung in its direction from precincts ranging from Alaska to
Washington, DC, Paris and Berlin, would be well-advised to dispatch all its
inhabitants forthwith to the Trinity Church graveyard which anchors the top
end of the Street. Or, as some wits would have it, perhaps Mayor
Bloomberg should just rename it "Main Street."
Many Washington politicians have evidently decided that a ringing denunciation
of "Wall Street greed and corruption" (Google results for a search
on that phrase: 1,620,000) is an ample substitute for thinking hard and
seriously about how to help repair the credit system’s meltdown, while Angela
Merkel of Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy of France have called for severe retribution
against the "excesses" of global capitalism, with, one imagines, no small dose of schadenfreude at the travails of Anglo-American capitalism.
But we digress.
The ways in which New York City has been fictitiously destroyed constitute a tour of the human imagination’s ability to contemplate destruction, but underlying them all seems to be a sense of righteous–or at least self-satisfied–indignation that we benighted residents of Gotham are only getting what we have coming to us. Among the animate and inanimate tools of our destruction have been "onslaughts of flood, famine, zombies, plague, conflagration, meteors, earthquakes, cyclones, hostile aliens, thermonuclear bombs, giant insects and King Kong himself." Here’s one high point:
In 1886, Joaquin Miller published "Destruction of Gotham," in which the decadent city is consumed by flames: "The very earth was on fire. The oil, the gas, the rum, the thousands of filthy things which man in his drunken greed had allowed to accumulate on the face of the island appealed to heaven for purification."
Ilustrators also got in on the act. Here’s one from 1917 advertising Liberty Bonds:
I think the biplanes circling Lady Liberty are a particularly sympathetic touch.
In the 1960’s, 1970’s, and in the 1980’s (as I can personally testify), "Fun City" was anything but. Homelessness and murder rates peaked, police and transit and sanitation workers went on strike, blackouts provoked looting and chaos, Midnight Cowboy symbolized the triumph of grit, lowlifes, and disorder, the City was famously viewed as ungovernable, it went de facto bankrupt and its appeal to the federal government for help fell on deaf ears (the only redeeming value of which was the Daily News‘ all-time great headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead"), and "white flight" reached an ugly apogee.
Fast forward to, say, 18 months ago, and we were on top of the world. Times Square had (like it or not) been transformed from XXX Porno Central to DisneyLand East, commercial rents were world-class, foreigners couldn’t pay enough for condos in the renovated Plaza Hotel, our murder rate fell to small Midwestern town levels, and, of course, Wall Street revenue and profits were, as they often are, in the stratosphere.
Clearly, we had over-reached.
Thank goodness we don’t have that to worry about any more. Our comeuppance is at hand. And about time, say I.
A final word. There’s a reason people from all over the world are tempted to pursue their dreams here. And to those who wonder how we’ll fare? I say:
We’ve been here before. We don’t, actually, like it. We know how to be innovative, how to re-imagine ourselves, how to re-create for the umpteenth time world-class industries on this slip of an island, and how to fight our way out of a tight fix.
Don’t take your eyes off us just because you think we’re down.
