This is an interesting article, but I think it misses some important points about why moviemakers and writers love to destroy New York City. As one commenter points out, New York is a symbol of not only American power but of human achievement. Destroying one of our greatest cities symbolically resets civilization back to zero.
But New York is also a great setting for an apocalypse from a storyteller’s point of view. Any survivors are going to be believably diverse in terms of age, education, class, ethnicity, etc., so you have a lot of choices when it comes to characters. A destroyed NYC is going to be scary, eerie and hazardous, but it’s not going to be that hard to find the basics, such as food, clothing and equipment. And getting off the island is an adventure in itself. I always go back to one of the scariest scenes in fiction, Larry Underwood making his way through a Lincoln Tunnel full of cars and corpses in The Stand. The movies Escape From New York and The Dark Knight Rises capitalize on the difficulties in escaping the city, which allows for much more tension than an apocalypse in Los Angeles or Chicago, where you can simply drive away.
Read: Big Apple Apocalypse: 200 Years of Destroying New York City | Paleofuture.
I had not thought about New York in such way.. it is symbolic of so much, so the filmmaker’s tragedy is multiplied when the city crumbles to internal and external invasions. We re so familiar with the skyline and some of the neighborhoods…and even those living across the nation feel something for the city.