Dan Genis

Dearly Beloved:

We are gathered here to say goodbye, for there is much to part with, but also to remember. Despite the survival of our alabaster towers in the face of a myriad threats, the sea has finally taken them, plunged below the cold Atlantic. New York has passed through many dangers, scathed, oh how scathed, but after the levees burst and the cold front of Atlantic water overcame Far Rockaway and Coney Island, it was just a matter of time. How easily did we forget that Staten Island disappeared in the 90’s! We just didn’t pay enough attention to this great city and now it is no longer New York, New York, so nice they named it twice… It is New York, Atlantis, forever lost to the wine dark sea.

Let us remember some of the plagues that burst upon the once-great city that foretold its doom. An American President, Gerald Ford, attempted to command its execution. Ford to New York: Drop Dead was the 1975 order to stifle us through bankruptcy. Then the Bronx was burning, another attempt by mainlanders to destroy the city. ‘Vote for Cuomo, not the Homo’ was how the city was slurred and Mayor Koch libeled by a father whose son was the last of our governors, now disgraced. Our city fought back against attacks as varied as Broken Windows policing, Donald Trump’s development, the Five Family commission and 9/11. But did the jet planes taking down the Twin Towers or Fat Tony Salerno end our fine city? Did Covid kill it? Close, but no cigar. 

The wine dark sea rose and rose, and we ignored the signs, reading about Katrina in our New York Times (now in a digital edition, from Canada) but never seeing its aquatic encroachment on our boroughs. When Staten Island went under, the Ferries just kept moving from the tip of Manhattan, so the tourists could see the harbor cheap. When the Statue of Liberty was up to her waist in ocean, we claimed it was art; The New Yorker said it was Christo at it again, while others put forth the idea that this was an homage to Planet of the Apes.

Losing Far Rockaway and Coney Island after hurricanes like Sandy and Ida was a blow, but all over the high ground of the aptly named Upper East and West Sides, we heard that the boroughs would dry out… but did they? And when the rollercoasters were condemned to the waves, what did we say but ‘they were bridge-and-tunnel anyway?’

As Brooklyn sank and Queens went under, we said Manhattan had always been an island, and as the last refugees crossed the George Washington bridge, we heard that Fort Lee was the Sixth Borough anyway. Today a few billionaires still perch in the gentrified highlands of the Bronx, governing a swamp of destruction.

Did we learn anything from the drowning of New York? I don’t think so. The signs were all there, the rainfall predictions and sea level rise spelled out for us. We knew it was coming, we knew the end was upon us. But as the deluge took out neighborhood after neighborhood, we just made excuses. Lower East Side lost its edge years ago. Williamsburg was too expensive. Midtown, shmidtown… and now we are left with only the work of Kevin Costner to watch and remember. His film foretold the damage that a fragile ecosystem and culture will sustain upon meeting another, stronger force. Oh how he danced with the wolves when he told us our future! Of course, the film I’m referring to is ‘Waterworld’, and let us remember how we once mocked its prophecies.

We remember New York. But New York, Atlantis is something we may never forget. Goodbye drowned city.