E. B. White writes in his essay “This is New York” of a recent change in the city’s psyche: “[It] 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…” His words evoke instant images of 747s and falling towers of dust. However, White made this observation not in the wake of September 11^th, 2001, but 52 years earlier in 1949.

White’s 1949 New York lives with a “stubborn fact of annihilation” born from the fear of Soviet nuclear destruction. The way he describes this threat’s effect on the city is eerily similar to what is said about a post-9/11 New York: “The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.” White speaks of an overwhelming anticipation of destruction that attaches itself to the subconscious of every New Yorker. This phenomenon of city-wide anxiety stands in stark contrast to his previous assertion that New York isolates its events from its residents. People are shot, festivals are had, the massaes come and go, and most New Yorkers will be oblivious.

Yet the city was unified by the idea of attack in 1949, just as it was in 2001. To say simply that everyone was scared together would be an incomplete explanation for the city’s unity. The resilience of New Yorkers grew in the face of attack as well fear. As White notes, “New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience…” and so they did not run from a vulnerable city but embraced it. New York’s inhabitants each accepted the new danger and added it to the pile of difficulties the city had already guaranteed. Each carried apprehension in his individual way, but all the while together they thought something like E. B. White’s declaration: “This [New York] must be saved…”