Near the end of yesterday’s Writing New York lecture on E. B. White, Jane Jacobs, and Robert Moses (the last via Marshall Berman), I talked about the ways in which White’s account of New York, often taken to be a timeless statement about some of the city’s abiding qualities, is in fact very much marked by the context in which it was written — specifically, the aftermath of World War II. In the aftermath of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, White realizes, all cities everywhere are now vulnerable:
The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now; in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
Part of what makes New York an irresistible target, of course, is the fact that it is where the United Nations was located: in fact, the cornerstone was laid in the year that White’s book was published. White (1899-1985) did not live to see the city attacked not by a flight of planes but a pair of planes, and reading his book in the aftermath of 9/11 was, to say the least, an uncanny experience.
What many New Yorkers don’t know was that 9/11 was not the first time that the tallest building in New York was hit by a plane. In 1945, the same year that White published Stuart Little, a B-52 bomber lost its way in thick July fog and crashed into the Empire State Building, hitting the north side of the building between the 79th and 80th floors. Fourteen people were killed; an elevator operator survived a plunge of 75 stories inside an elevator, still a world record for longest elevator plunge survived.
Take a look at the footage:
Ric Burns thought of using an account of the event in the seventh episode of his documentary film New York, but realized that it was rendered redundant by the episode’s opening segment about the death of Fiorello LaGuardia. Then, he says, he thought about using it to introduce the eighth episode — about the World Trade Center — but discovered that there was no way to use it without seeming “insufferable.” You can read more about his decision in our post from June 13, 2010. The unfinished footage is preserved as a bonus feature on the seventh disc of the series.
Surely this episode must have been somewhere in the back of White’s mind when he penned the final pages of Here is New York.
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