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In the Big Apple, big worries Alert Level? Extremely.By Rick Horowitz NEW YORK -- A simple morning stroll through Midtown -- so many sights, so many scenes. What could be more relaxing? Almost anything. The sidewalks are busy with people, and the sidewalks are nothing compared to the streets themselves. It's rush hour, and everyone's in a rush, except that everything's moving at a crawl. "If you want to get arrested, you'll turn," the cop is explaining to the bus driver. "Otherwise, you'll go straight." This bus driver -- his bus creeping uptown on crowded Madison Avenue -- is intent on making a right turn onto equally crowded East 57th Street. The cop is just as intent on keeping that from happening, and he shares his reasoning with the bus driver, who evidently still needs convincing. "Because I said so," the cop explains. It's the first day of the new alert -- specific threats to specific buildings, and who knows what else? -- and everyone's just ever-so-slightly on edge. Can you blame them? I can't. On Park Avenue, in the East 60s, a very large white truck is trying to navigate a very tight left turn without mounting the flower-boxed median strip that divides uptown and downtown traffic. It takes some doing -- the truck has to be at least 40 feet long -- and while I'm rooting it through its maneuvers, I'm casually comparing it to other, much smaller trucks I've seen in the news lately. I'm comparing it, and I'm trying to estimate its explosive power. If this is the one. Or is this other one the one? The modest green panel truck parked quietly at the curb, with the company's name and phone number painted on the door. I've never heard of the company, but it sounds normal enough. (As if that matters. Do I really think the truck I'm watching for is going to say "Qaeda Terrorists"?) It's simply amazing, once you start thinking of trucks as bombs on wheels, how many trucks you notice in a city the size of New York. Large trucks and small trucks, new trucks and old trucks -- they're everywhere. Almost everywhere. Don't forget the buses and the taxis, the SUVs and the minivans, and even the occasional simple automobile, like the one that pulls alongside me as I walk East 52nd. It's a silver-colored, late-model car, with New York plates, and it's ready to pull into a mid-block parking garage. I make eye contact with the driver and motion for him to cut in front of me. (A totally non-New York thing to do, I realize -- I've been away too long.) The driver swings right, into the entrance, and suddenly pulls to a stop. The security guard needs to inspect the car -- a mirror on a pole to check for catastrophe hidden underneath, then a quick glance into the trunk. I try to multiply the silver car by this-many hundreds of vehicles in this one garage, multiplied again by this many hundreds -- or is it thousands? -- of garages just like this one all over Manhattan, and Brooklyn, and Queens, and... It only takes one missed clue. Two police cars, their sirens blaring, race up Madison Avenue. (Where? Why?) Vehicles jam every intersection, honking for space -- or just for practice. Whenever the horns and sirens fall momentarily silent, there's the constant whir of helicopters hovering overhead, just in case. I consider stopping briefly to make a phone call. Then I decide that there are better -- which is to say, less lethal -- places to stop than right alongside the former CBS building on Sixth Avenue. The terrorists are looking to attack "iconic" targets, the stories say, and CBS (or even former CBS) certainly sounds iconic to me -- but in New York, what doesn't? Rockefeller Center? St. Patrick's Cathedral? The Museum of Modern Art? Times Square? It's a triumph of American branding; everything we do and make and sell is known all over the world. How nice for us. I keep walking. Here's a Coca-Cola truck, parked at curbside. A FedEx truck, disgorging a pile of boxes. Another truck delivering coffee. Another that carries elevator repairmen -- or so it claims. Another that offers "Office Relocation Services." (Do terrorists have a sense of humor?) Another with a sign on its rear panel: "Safety is My Goal." Mine, too. So you might even wonder, if you were taking your own morning stroll through Midtown, whether you're as safe as you could be, here in New York or anywhere else. Whether we're all as safe as we might have been had those hundreds of billions of dollars, all that time and talent and energy and military might, not been diverted to settle old scores with Saddam Hussein, but devoted instead to getting the people who are most single-minded about getting us -- with enough left over to make our airports and our docks, our roads and our rails and our buildings truly secure right here at home. You might wonder that. Me? I'm too busy looking for the truck. Posted 8/03/04. Get
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Rick Horowitz
