1924 Imagined an Earthquake in 1932

The October 1924 issue of Scribner’s magazine also tackled the issue of earthquakes in an article that imagined the aftermath of a horrible New York earthquake in 1932:

After the New York earthquake of 1932 a group of surviving bankers and publicists were discussing the situation in a Scarborough home that survived the catastrophe. The losses had been about nine hundred thousand lives and fifty billions of dollars. The business district of Manhattan was a mass of smouldering ruins with the army and the State militia burning corpses in pits and cleaning up the rubbish. The outstanding fact of the earthquake was that skyscraper construction had utterly failed, and every elevator had gone out of action. With the arctic gale that was blowing, fire-escapes had been covered with icicles and wholly inadequate. Panic and fire had produced most of the deaths and the lack of park-ways in lower Manhattan had created congestion of automobiles that the Fire Department was unable to cope with.

The article went on to describe how 300,000 people had been “asphyxiated and roasted underground,” in the subway system. And 300 “leading statesmen” were killed in this hypothetical future scenario because a big political convention was in town. Even the president and Secretary of War were killed, according to the article’s fantastical imagining.

There were also refugees in Central Park, of course, based on Scribner’s telling of it.

From 59th Street north there was much earthquake damage, but the fires
had been better handled. Eight hundred thousand refugees were camped in Central Park. The Brooklyn refugees were under martial law in the Garden City district. One hundred and twenty-four thousand corpses had been collected in the North and East Rivers, and many of the ferry slips and docks had broken down from the caving away of the main land.

Yikes.