Apocalypse then

Max Page

In his book The City’s End (NYU, $37.50), Yale professor Max Page meditates on two centuries of fantasies about New York City’s collapse, brought about by fire, freezing and alien invasion. TONY asked him to list his five favorite Gotham-disaster stories.

Caesar’s Column (1890)
Wall Streeters, beware when the masses revolt: In Caesar’s Column, a political novel by populist party leader Ignatius Donnelly, the city’s elite are killed and stacked by the revolutionary Caesar Lomellin into a monumental column in Union Square.

“The Tilting Island” (1909)
Also: Beware the building boom. In this short story by Thomas J. Vivian and Grena J. Bennett, an unknown geological fault line at 125th Street opens up because, well, the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan have become so heavy that they split Manhattan in half. “Like Babel we have built!” says a fictional Columbia University geologist looking at the gaping chasm.

The War of the Worlds (1939 radio broadcast)
We just passed the 70th anniversary of the Halloween radio fright that sent Americans running into the streets, fearful that the martians were finally here. What we forget is that it was made so realistic because Orson Welles’s narrative described each building that was crushed as the martians made their way into Manhattan.… Until the radio broadcast was cut off. The precious city every American knew about was no more.

The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959)
In this film directed by Ranald MacDougall, Harry Belafonte makes his way from small-town Pennsylvania to New York in the wake of nuclear disaster and finds the city abandoned, or so he thinks. He wanders through an empty Times Square, only to find later the lone survivors, a man and a woman. This ménage à trois is ahead of its time, and the spookiness of the empty city is unforgettable.

I Am Legend (2007)
Cornfields growing in Times Square? Now that’s a sustainable, if frightening, future for the city. The first 45 minutes of this Will Smith vehicle are a marvel of imagining the city abandoned in an instant, as people fled a horrific virus without a cure. The film devolves into a zombie flick, but it is hard not to be moved by the terror of a city without people.

The City’s End (Yale, $37.50) is out now.