I found the online “Nuke York, New York” article fascinating especially as someone that considers herself a New Yorker, an a person that has been displaced from the city in the face of natural disaster. It was somewhat nice to see that the correlation between New York and fictional apocalypse depictions was more than my keeping my eyes open for my hometown, and interesting to see how 9/11 and Hiroshima imagery combined in the public psyche.

(Although I hate to take a statistical look at war and national tragedies, the number dead in 9/11 was far closer to the number who died at Pearl Harbor than in Hiroshima. I assume that 9/11 relates more to Hiroshima in illustration it takes place in a time where Nuclear attack was a possibility.)

I do believe that New York City is integral part of the American Identity as a meeting place for different kinds of people, an industrial powerhouse and the relationship between this country and the world. However, another reason New York is so important, is that the process of suburbanization, which dominated the lifestyle ideal of the 1950’s and is how many Americans live in the automobile age that followed, began around this city. There are roughly 10 million people living in the New York suburbs. It seems that if New York were to fall, people would go there, rather than hide and live like savages in the souless skeleton of a concrete jungle.

I have not seen very many representations of a modern apocalyptic suburb, possibly because it is not as fascinating of a setting as more busy or vast landscapes and partly because it didn’t exist in the more classical works like Revelations that modern pieces draw from. Broderick and Jacobs mention Shadow On The Hearth, a 50’s science fiction novel taking place in Westchester, which deals with the typical day of a family after the father does not return after the NYC is nuclear warfare, and Atomic Attack, a tv special based off the book.

If New York would to be destroyed while leaving the rest of the country it would be an apocalypse, and the city of 8 million’s cultural impact would be sorely missed, expecially from those dependent on urban commerce. How would the suburbs fare? I wonder how an apocalyptic New York would be if it had to quarentine itself to avoid some sort of suburban danger.