Norton), convulsive destruction is rare, and even more rarely definitive. It’s harder to grasp how that passage unfolds, except, perhaps, in the form of some violent upheaval - an earthquake, a pestilence, an alien invasion, burning everything in a matter of minutes.Īnd yet, as Annalee Newitz writes in a new book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age (W.W. These sites make it easy to envision the future obliteration of Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles. How does a great city die? How does a place that generations saw as a vibrant center - essential, teeming, terrifying, grand - become a sad and silent field? I’ve always found the relics of mass abandonment creepily thrilling: Mayan pyramids pushing through the jungle canopy at Calakmul in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, raucous with monkeys the ochre-and-gold remains of Morgantina, a gracious Greek enclave high in the Sicilian hills Bodie, California, once the home of 10,000 miners and scroungers and now just vacant houses and taverns parching in the desert sun.
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