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A New York State of Mind
September 28, 2001 edition
By staff writer Alexandra Marks
The Christian Science Monitor

PATRIOTIC STANCE:
Jose Cintron has a relative missing following the attacks.
Photo Credit: Adam Nadel
Special to the Monitor

While people here are wary, they seem to be coping with their insecurities better than the rest of the nation.

From the 'A' train to the Rainbow Room, a tour of venues that most define New York shows how much the city has changed -- and refuses to -- 17 days after the attack.

"Normal" in New York has never been like "normal" in any other place. This is a city with its own definition of a minute, where a mile is measured in blocks that are walked or sped beneath in dark tunnels dug by sweating forefathers a century ago.

This is a place full of unabashed hubris, the home of the bruisin' Bronx Bombers and the Subway Series, Wall Street's financial powerhouses and Broadway's glitterati.

This is New York, where the mayor is both chief sports fan and premier opera booster. The city that was 24/7 at least a century before this became a cliché.

And it is still New York, although tempered, made a touch wary by terrorist assault. A sudden civility has replaced its legendary brusqueness. People now actually make eye contact on the subway.

A need for community has brought out millions for chats on their stoops or at the corner deli: Even those who like to remain anonymous, as they can in this city more than any other, are reaching out. Others are rethinking their all-work, all-the-time ethos.

But the city's character, its irrepressibility, remains largely intact. Defiantly so, the way it's always been.

Cycles of cataclysm and recovery have shaped New York's history. From the British occupation, through labor riots, rebellions, near bankruptcy, and even -- eerily -- an earlier plane crash into the Empire State Building. The city has always embodied the purest example of that distinctly American ability to pick up and move on.

Its people, their neighborhoods, ballparks, and theaters tell the story of how the city has changed but remains the same -- despite what poet laureate Billy Collins calls the "twin holes" left where the World Trade Center once stood.
(More: The Christian Science Monitor News Source)
2001 © The Christian Science Monitor..

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