The Future of New York

Hello! and welcome to my blog. My name is Sunny and I'm currently a student at LaGuardia Community College. This semester, I am enrolled in a class known at this college as: ENN195.0962: Violence in American Art and Culture, taught by Dr. Justin Rogers-Cooper.

This week, we started reading a novel entitled: “Caesar’s Column,” written by Ignatius Donnelly. The novel was first published in 1890 and was classified as a dystopian science fiction. This novel was actually many years ahead of its time and describes a futuristic New York set one hundred years into the future from the publish date of this work. To my astonishment, some of the “futuristic” advances in New York in the novel are actually realities that we experience today in the year 2014. Today, I want to reveal to you some of the ideas Connelly presented in the novel and connect them with the active and functioning realities of those ideas in present time.

One of the first ideas that Connelly flaunts is the notion of a subway system. “Below all the business streets are subterranean streets, where vast trains are drawn, by smokeless and noiseless electric motors, some carrying passengers, others freight. At every street corner there are electric elevators, by which passengers can ascend or descend to the trains. And high above the house-tops, built on steel pillars, there are other railroads, not like the unsightly elevated trains we saw pictures of in our school books, but crossing diagonally over the city, at a great height, so as to best economize time and distance.” With the exception of elevators on every street corner, this passage clearly describes what we New Yorkers know today as the subway system. Over one hundred years ago, Donnelly is able to accurately define the subway system that is used today.

Another prediction that Donnelly is accurately able to make is the Prohibition Era which actually took place between 1920 and 1933 in the United States. In the novel, Donnelly writes: “Our poor ignorant ancestors of a hundred years ago drank alcohol in various forms, in quantities which the system could not consume or assimilate, and it destroyed their organs and shortened their lives. Great agitations arose until the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages was prohibited over nearly all the world.” I’m not sure as to why Donnelly makes this prediction in his novel, but one can argue that he simply expanded on this idea of no alcohol which actually dates back to the Xia Dynasty (ca. 2070 BC – ca. 1600 BC) in China when Yu the Great prohibited alcohol throughout the kingdom. A possible reason for this concept to be included could stem from the “wonderful” image Donnelly is trying to paint of New York. A picture in which all is glorious and nothing negative exists, possibly to set up something crucially contradicting that eventually challenges our thinking and makes us question this concept of a “wonderful” New York.

“I shall sit down in a chair; there is an electric magazine in the seat of it.” Here, Donnelly is clearly describing what we now identify today as a tablet. Tablets allow us to read books, magazines, articles published on the internet, and even this blog I’m currently writing. I’m not sure where Donnelly drew inspiration from for the “electric magazine,” but maybe we now know where Steve Jobs drew his inspiration from for the first iPad and iPhone.