The Demolition

A story I wrote years ago, when I was feeling especially sour on NYC.

It’s no small business, demolishing an entire city, but where New York was concerned, we had no choice but to start over. The astronomical cost of living, the traffic-snarled streets, the foul smell seeping up through the pavement as though a foul essence had been baked in by time and dreary sunlight – such problems could not be solved through repair or refurbishment. We’d seen too many public works projects stall, year after year, until they were crushed by ineffective management and ballooning budgets. Demolition was the cheapest solution not only in regards to money, but also time, manpower, and tears. The benefit to future generations would far outweigh the suffering of current inhabitants. I therefore set about my work with peace in my head and heart.

We called our enterprise the Future American Restoration Operation, or FARO, the acronym a sly double entendre referring to man largely responsible for the city’s predicament, Robert Moses. Few understood the joke, though. Accused of power tripping, I had to explain ad nauseam the history of the city’s myriad tunnels and bridges and expressways, all of them one man’s attempt to remake the city in his own gnarled image. Under the FARO umbrella were architects, physicians, statisticians, electricians, lawyers, surveyors, plumbers, drivers, personal assistants, caterers, bodyguards, union representatives, union busters, towmen, foremen, and longshoremen, among others, all of whom were absolutely necessary to the smooth and swift execution of our task.

First came – or went – Staten Island.

The Verrazano Bridge buckled when a few well-placed explosive charges kneecapped the major supports. We cheered as the cables snapped and cars and trucks and buses flew into the Hudson. The demolition then proceeded westward. 

There had been no time to inform the residents, serve them eviction notices, forcibly remove the stubborn. The accursed city had to come down as soon as possible. Mothers fled the suburbs with screaming children in tow as bulldozers tore through their homes. We took wrecking balls to fortified structures and leveled the most stubborn with explosives. Soon, a great dust cloud had formed above Staten Island, drifting westward for New Jersey to deal with. All FARO employees were henceforth required to wear gas masks, except for the ground crews, who needed all the oxygen their lungs could muster. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. They’d been sourced from Brooklyn and Queens, and hated their neighbors across the Narrows, many of whom staffed the police stations and school boards that had tormented them for so long. Gleefully they plowed into day-care centers, crowded churches, and retirement homes. In only three weeks, Staten Island was razed.

The citizenry was understandably alarmed. Never let it be said that we were not sympathetic to their plight. The construction (now destruction) unions almost caved to the press, but were pressed with cash until they happily entombed themselves with FARO. The mayor and governor and senators, hoping for payouts of their own, attempted to fight us in court. The National Guard turned up, several battalions dressed to kill and eager for the opportunity. Yet the plaintiffs were all rebuffed, turned down, ignored. The National Guard stood aside and watched us roll past. The contract simply came from too high up.

The destruction of the Bronx began at the northern border of Van Cortland Park and moved south from there. (The residents of Yonkers were overjoyed to see our machinery, drawing near their doorstep, halt and about-face.) Nobody much cared for the Bronx anyway – though a few overenthusiastic residents mounted a stand at The GeicoDome, formerly known as Yankee Stadium, lobbing firebombs and taking potshots at our frontline of bulldozers and backhoes. No matter! For when a driver was struck down, or a machine hobbled, all would be swept up by another, larger machine, and propelled into the supports of the stadium, which collapsed with a ghastly sound of flatulence, accompanied by a cemeterial stench of hotdogs and peanuts.

Beyond the GeicoDome, there were few signs of life – most of the borough was empty. The streets were quiet, the body count low, until we plowed through what had once been Columbia University. A squall of squatters flocked out of the ruins and made for Manhattan. Some dove into the rivers, but most crowded onto the bridges, and we knocked those down too. From the shore, I saw people fall, and I remember them hanging in the air above the water, suspended like marionettes above the crushing tides.

The dust cloud became a permanent fixture over the east coast, swirling and shimmering and occasionally raining great gobs of carcinogenic mud. Gas masks came into fashion. When I retired to my home in Long Island at the end of each busy day, I would see commercials for masks by Tommy Hilfiger, masks by Chanel, kinky masks by Victoria’s Secret, children’s masks at GAP. Everyone stumbled around looking like bipedal insects, unable to recognize one another, probing blindly for walls and tables and outstretched hands, except for our ground crew, who continued to labor happily without the encumbrance of masks. Prolonged exposure to the cloud had caused many of them to undergo bizarre mutations – spaghettified limbs, protruding bones, additional noses and whatnot – but due to the unique chemical composition in the air, none of them realized it. They swung and dug and drove happily through the dust.

Somehow, they imagined we’d exclude their homes, though the contracts clearly stated otherwise. In Queens, some of our laborers showed up on the wrong side of the bulldozers. They went from shouting to shoving to throwing to shooting. With a diminished workforce, we spent nearly a full week trying to advance past 188th, which some enterprising soul had strewn with landmines. Our laborers had been paid and treated well, so I took their rebellion as a personal affront. It looked, for a moment, as though the project might stall.

FARO found its solution in Midwesterners, who had no great love for – actually seemed to resent – the shining beacon of the east. New York Senators, after all, had sponsored the bill that sold Michigan’s upper peninsula to Canada. However, the Midwesterners were an odd bunch, as I discovered in one remarkable instance when our machinery went silent beneath an overpass in Flushing Meadows. There, an elderly man was sitting on a camp stool, playing a violin. Behind the lenses of his gas mask, his eyes were milky-grey, blind to the onslaught of FARO. Our new workforce gathered around, cradling their helmets. Some even closed their eyes and began to sway. I was surprised that they could appreciate Boccherini. When the blind violinist drew a final, plaintive note from his instrument, they returned to theirs, and he was swept up and away, vanishing with the music.

Brooklyn fell so easily it doesn’t bear mentioning.

Which left Manhattan. There had been some debate about whether to spare it. Its grid was easier to navigate than the tangled roadways in other boroughs, and many important businesses were located there, as well as the homes of many important people. Could it be saved?

After some debate, word came down from above, one word: an emphatic no. Manhattan had to go too.

By then most of the island was deserted. Higher powers had mustered their forces to evacuate its most valued residents, and the others had been afforded time to flee. There were stragglers, though perhaps that’s not the right word for them – a resistance was mounted, but perhaps that’s not the right word either, as their efforts utterly failed to slow us down, less a resistance than another obstacle to be destroyed. They wore Yankees caps and shouted, “Remember Queens! Remember Brooklyn! Remember the Bronx!” (They showed no love for Staten Island, or the Mets.) They camped out in the highest stories of the tallest towers, in abandoned penthouses and on rooftop patios. Sharpshooters, firebombs, and landmines plagued us as gnats would plague a giant.

The skyscrapers, however, were too tall and well-fortified to bring down using ground-based machinery. We tried planting high explosives around their foundations, but the resistance picked off our operators with ease. We couldn’t even come at them from below, since they’d booby-trapped the tunnels and sewers. With no other option, we purchased a couple of decommissioned F-117 Nighthawks, a monstrous yet necessary expense. One day, an ear-splitting scream issued from the dust cloud, and a great fire rose within. Before long, Manhattan had been nearly reduced to its original, primordial state. A few clusters of apartment blocks remained in Harlem, the Lower East Side, Villages East and Greenwich. We could have taken those with land machinery, but we had the Nighthawks, so hell, why not? They got bombed too.

Two exceptions are worth mentioning. One was the Memorial in the Financial District, a pit in the ground, forgotten names carved into the bronze parapets lining its maw. It was so old that nobody could remember what it memorialized, but the Nighthawk pilots refused to approach it, and the Midwesterners refused to touch it. I would have sledgehammered it myself from parapet to pit bottom, but if I so much as chipped a stone, the workers would have lynched me. Though none of them could say what the pit was for, they seemed attached to the site. Whatever moved them to guard it was so deeply embedded in their hearts that the slightest debasement would have been a mortal wound. So we left it alone, and there it remains even today, a hole in the wasteland.

The other exception was the Great Lawn in Central Park, which we ordered the Nighthawks to precision-strike. When they were done, the word FARO burned so brightly in the grass it could be seen from space, through the dust cloud.

The resistance ended in the Lincoln Tunnel. They were by now reduced to a smattering of holdouts, locking arms, chanting slogans and hymns. Most were old — had grown up with the city and couldn’t bear to leave it even under penalty of death. What we saw as irredeemable flaws in its design were to them as essential as ventricles and veins. They defied change most ardently, yet held the line most peacefully, staring us down with what some might have mistaken for courage. We mowed them down too. We ground them beneath our treads. We collapsed the tunnel from the outside with aquatic mines and plowed what remained into the water. Our work was finally done.

You may wonder what we did with the refuse. Of course, there was much debris left over, great piles of it. The tallest rivaled the Macbook Mound in Lewis County for the highest point in the state. However, leaving the wreckage to sit there would have been paradoxical to the ultimate goal of the project, which was to begin anew. As ardent believers in the power of recycling, we decided to put it to good use, and pushed it all into the East and Hudson and Harlem Rivers. By the time we were finished, you could walk from Jersey City to Long Island without having to enter a tunnel or cross a bridge or wait for a ferry.

Recently, for the first time since the project’s conclusion, I journeyed out to where LaGuardia Airport had once stood, so that I might reminisce. I saw a vast expanse of brown, a new American desert, and a brown sky above, hardly distinguishable from the earth. My heart swelled. What had been New York City was now a blank slate upon which anything could be written: a future for this plot of land, once decrepit but now replenished. Its possibilities were infinite.

Today I learned that New Jersey bought it all. They plan to turn it into a landfill.