Sixteen years after 9/11, ever-vigilant city still on edge

NEW YORK — It’s a typical late summer weekend in New York’s Times Square, and tourists from around the world are snapping pictures beneath the commercial hub’s iconic neon billboards — watched closely by a heavy contingent of police.

Four cruisers are parked in the middle of the busy intersection, and pedestrian zones have been surrounded by barriers to stop cars from ramming the crowd, a mode of attack favored by violent extremists in recent years.

“I don’t like to come to places like this,” says Sue Garcia, a massage therapist from Brooklyn. “Or anywhere where incidents have happened repeatedly — the fear comes to mind.”

Fear of an attack. Fear of another 9/11, the deadliest terrorist assault in history, when almost 3,000 lives were extinguished, many in the rubble of the World Trade Center.

For New Yorkers who lost loved ones, narrowly survived or just witnessed the event, memories remain fresh and old wounds are reopened on its anniversary. And a perpetual state of high alert is the new normal.

Garcia, now 33, was in high school when the planes slammed into the twin towers. She saw them burn then collapse, and walked all the way home like hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers that day after metro services were suspended.

“I was there, I saw it over and over again, I don’t need to think about it,” she said.

But her mind always drifts toward the horrors of that day, whenever it is mentioned on TV, or even “when I hear an airplane: it is like the trigger to the thought. It has subsided over the years but it is still there”, she added.

Or while waiting to meet her sister in Times Square, “The Crossroads of the World”, that symbolizes the spirit of New York.

Twice in recent years, catastrophe loomed. In May 2010, police discovered a car packed with explosives and primed for carnage.

In May, a mentally-ill ex-soldier deliberately drove his sedan into 23 pedestrians, killed a young US tourist.

Many are also convinced that, even though recent terror attacks have focused on Europe, it is New York, the beating heart of the Western world, that remains the prime target.

“What better target, unfortunately, than NYC?” asks Tim Lambert, an IT consultant.

The city, he says, is a “magnet for people from all over the world... It symbolizes the freedoms that we have, the money that we have. What better way to make a statement?”

The 52-year-old said a heavier police presence is now a fact of life that people have come to expect.

“I am not comfortable with it, but it is the new norm. The world is changing and the terrorist threat is part of that change,” he said.