Eerie Quiet In The City

The Associated Press

September 12, 2001

Prayer services replaced baseball games and Broadway matinees. People walked alongside deserted streets normally clogged with cars and buses. Construction workers who dig foundations instead dug for corpses.

New Yorkers found themselves today in a strange city, its normally frantic atmosphere gone. Bicyclists crept down the center lanes of broad avenues as pedestrians, some with teary eyes, passed shuttered restaurants and stores.

Its just eerie, contractor John Sullivan said outside a midtown Manhattan construction site. He had no idea whether his crew would resume work Wednesday. Its not even like a Saturday or a Sunday, he said, and the people you do see, theres just no life in them.

Many security restrictions on the citys vast transportation system were lifted today, allowing commuters whose companies did not close for the day to get to work on subways, commuter trains and buses. Many businesses were closed including the entire financial trade district.

Upper levels of the George Washington Bridge into northern Manhattan were reopened, but other bridges and tunnels remained closed to car traffic, leaving a city famous for its colossal traffic jams absent of drivers honking their horns in frustration.

At a Dunkin Donuts in midtown, the racks that normally hold hundreds of doughnuts and muffins were empty. Trucks had not been allowed into the city to make the morning delivery.

Theres just coffee, said employee Robert Lopiro, 35. But everyone understands: They dont even ask whats happened with the doughnuts.

The regions three major airports were closed indefinitely. The Port Authority bus terminal in Times Square was also shut down.

There was no mail service at all in lower Manhattan; schools, courts and colleges remained closed. Only essential staff were at the United Nations.

Before leaving Queens for his accounting job in Manhattan, 43-year-old Andy Davino had to convince his two worried sons why he would bother.

I told them Life goes on, you cant be afraid to go out of your house because of something like this, Davino said.

Still, Davino was apprehensive as his subway train descended into a tunnel into Manhattan. The five-minute ride underneath the East River seemed longer than ever before as Davino wondered whether terrorists might strike again.

Luckily, the lights didnt even flicker, he said. Sullivan, 58, had just called his wife, who was thinking of taking a train from New Jersey to Washington, D.C., to visit a friend whose husband was missing in the Pentagon attack.

But first, Sullivans wife was going to an 8:30 a.m. Mass.

Shes going to pray for everybody, not just him, Sullivan said.

In lower Manhattan, Felipe Baez spent hours of his morning performing a grimmer task. The 37-year-old construction worker from the Bronx had volunteered to poke through rubble near the Trade Center to find the dead and had to leave after discovering the charred body of a woman.

It was all twisted like the wreckage, Baez said. After a while, I just couldnt take it. Its got my mind messed up now.