American Quarterly

Yablon, Nick.
The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1909-19
American Quarterly - Volume 56, Number 2, June 2004, pp. 308-347

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Turn-of-the-century New York was the scene not only of unprecedented urban construction but also of systematic destruction, as the first generation of skyscrapers was beginning to fall victim to the capitalist dictates of profit and turnover. While Henry James's The American Scene, with its notalgia for the "Old New York," has been taken to be emblematic of the response to usch upheavals in the built landscape, this article identifies an alternative and overlooked site of critique: the post-apocalyptic fiction published in pulp magazines. By bringing these popular narratives of a post-urban future into dialogue with Progressivist economic accounts of the "logic of the wrecking ball," the article demonstrates how the trope of the skyscraper as a "future ruin" emerged as a powerful expression of the transformed nature of spatio-temporal experience during an age of speculative urban construction.