The destroying planes

Delanceyplace.com has a selection from Here is New York by E.B. White:

In 1949, famed author E.B. White lamented all the changes that had occurred in New York City in a few short years. More than sixty years later, it all seems eerily prescient:

To a New Yorker, the city is both changeless and changing. In many respects it neither looks nor feels the way it did twenty-five years ago. New York City has changed in tempo and in temper during the years I have known it. There is greater tension, increased irritability. You encounter it in many places, in many faces. The normal frustrations of modern life are here multiplied and amplified; a single run of a cross-town bus contains, for the driver, enough frustration and annoyance to carry him over the edge of sanity: the light that changes always an instant too soon, the passenger that bangs on the shut door, the truck that blocks the only opening, the coin that slips to the floor, the question asked at the wrong moment. There is greater tension and there is greater speed. The subtlest change in New York City is something people don't speak much about, but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York City now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York City the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York City has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York City must hold a steady, irresistible charm. It used to be that the Statue of Liberty was the signpost that proclaimed New York City and translated it for all the world. Today Liberty shares the role with Death. Along the East River, from the razed slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay, as though in a race with the spectral flight of planes, men are carving out the permanent headquarters of the United Nations (photo, top), the greatest housing project of them all. In its stride, New York City takes on one more interior city, to shelter, this time, all governments, and to clear the slum called war. New York City is not a capital city, it is not a national capital or a state capital. But it is by way of becoming the capital of the world.
This race between the destroying planes (photo, bottom) and the struggling Parliament of Man sticks in all our heads. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.

Rico says the planes won the race...