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Times Square bomb fails to shatter city spirit

Ellis Henican

March 7, 2008

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'Hey Brian," the city police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, called over to a subordinate yesterday. "Can you go back to 3:39 and 40 seconds?"

This was in the briefing room at One Police Plaza. Kelly, who stands like a Marine and speaks like a college guy - he is both - was staring up at a large plasma TV, where a grainy security video was jerking back and forth.

"At 3:40:43," the commissioner said, "you see the blast."

Truth is, you couldn't see much of the blast from this angle - even less of the man on a bike police believe is responsible for it. But you sure could see the giant clouds of white smoke, rising into the air of a pre-dawn Times Square morning, directly in front of the busiest Armed Services Recruiting Station in the United States.

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This was shocking in its own way.

Here it was, barely eight hours later, and these grainy pictures were already going out everywhere, which is just what happens today when the words "explosion" and "New York" are used in a single sentence.

Nine-eleven might have "changed everything," as we keep hearing. But 43rd and Broadway is still the crossroads of the world.

I'm not saying the city was shrugging off yesterday's explosion at the recruiting station and its shattered window out front. The army of police on the sidewalk belied a suggestion like that. But if the central purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, no one looked too terrified yesterday.

The detectives were doing their jobs as they always do. Traffic - in the street and the subway - was back in motion amazingly fast. And thousands of regular people, visitors, commuters and residents alike, were back on the street just like that.

"Stuff is always happening in New York," Brian Mooney, here from Chicago with his wife, Elaine, told me in front of the W Hotel, just a couple of blocks north.

Even the Times Square tourists were taking it all in stride.

And despite the forest of surveillance cameras that are everywhere around here, it was two traditional tools of police work - speaking to witnesses and gathering physical evidence - that were paying off most.

Cops have already found what they believe to be the culprit's bicycle, abandoned five blocks from Times Square. And one witness seems to have caught a pretty good glimpse of the bicycling bomber as he weaved toward the recruitment center and impending white smoke.

"We had a witness today who said he saw an individual wearing a hooded jacket," Kelly said. "He was riding very slow and carrying a backpack."

It was apparently the hoodie and yesterday's temperature that made this particular witness do a double-take. "Although it was cold," Kelly said, "it wasn't cold enough for an individual to have everything covered. His whole face was covered."

So why such a relatively ordinary response to such a dicey moment? Didn't 9/11 supposedly turn New York into Jitter Town? Hasn't it been less than seven years? Doesn't everyone expect the terrorists to attack spectacularly again?

You got the feeling, listening to Kelly and walking the blocks around Times Square, that it was only a matter of minutes until the nation's busiest Armed Services Recruiting Station would be signing up fresh troops again.

We got some lucky breaks this time.

The explosion was relatively small. There was no obvious connection to the Middle East. Nothing seemed to connect the blast to the anti-war protests that are a constant fixture here.

Indeed, the parallels being drawn by police all connected the explosion to earlier mini-blasts at the Mexican and British consulates over the past three years. Small blasts, just before dawn, seemingly the work of a lone man on a bicycle - there were some eerie similarities.

Bad as they obviously are, it'll take a whole lot more than that to rattle New Yorkers now.