Biting the Apple

NEW YORK CITY. The blare of sirens off screeching white-and-blue patrol cars and platoons of on-high-alert city cops – scenes straight out of NYPD Blue – welcomed my arrival in the Big Apple.
Big time! So I imagined, seeing all the ruckus as I came out the subway’s Lexington station and walked to Grand Central Terminal. Only to be yanked back to reality: “It’s all standard security now here,” said Mary Jo ‘Angging’ Palencia, the wife’s best friend in the Colegio del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus way back in Iloilo City, way farther back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“There are even dogs stationed upstairs,” continued Angging who works for The Versailles Foundation/Claude Monet-Giverny officed in Grand Central.
A sense of siege permeates New York. The terror of 911 still grips the city. Compounded by the current crisis in the Middle East where America is again trying to do a fireman’s job. An arsonist’s job, one Arab guy sneered.
Nowhere is this – the siege, not the fireman’s role – more apparent than at St. Patrick’s Cathedral down Fifth Avenue. Posted on every door of the seat of the New York archdiocese are New York’s finest. Their ubiquitous patrol cars parked at strategic spots.
Enter the cathedral and your bag goes through thorough inspection check while you have to empty your pockets and go buzzed with hand-held detectors by burly, but courteous private security personnel. Their kind too stand as sentinels by each heavy wooden door, and at the cathedral’s very nave.
Comes to mind a suicide bomber blowing up himself and everybody else after taking holy communion. Morbid. Or one in priestly habit opening his arms in fraternal greeting, “Peace be with you,” as he drops unpinned fragmentation grenades. More morbid.
Across St. Patrick’s, at the mecca of art deco that is the Rockefeller Plaza, police herded to the makeshift stage of NBC’s Today Show a placard-toting audience from across America. Police presence was even more pronounced at the other side of West 49th Street with the septuagenarian group Chicago performing for another NBC show.
Up East 51st corner Park Avenue, a portion of the street has been appropriated for NYPD Precinct 17, complete with a communications command container van and concrete barriers.
At Battery Park, gateway to Liberty and Ellis Islands, tourists and visitors have to go through full-body detectors and their bags through x-ray machines similar to those used in major airports. And yes, cameras and cellphones are required to be turned off as one goes through the security tent to the ferry boats.
Patrol boats of the NYPD and the FDNY – the heroic Fire Department of New York of 911 fame – ride the waves between Liberty and Ellis.
At Central Park, mounted cops have always been a fixture. Now they are augmented with more foot patrols.
The first time I was here in September 2000, it was a breeze through the 86th Floor observatory of the Empire State Building. Now, the security checks are as detailed as a needle-in-a-haystack search.
Broadway and Times Square have too their full complement of cops-on-foot and cops-on-cars.
The rubble has been totally swept from Ground Zero. Construction of the new World Trade Center has started. Still, all points to the now hallowed site are guarded by policemen.
Never again a 911, indeed. That is the mindset here and, I presume, in all America.
All these security measures notwithstanding, New York is far from a garrison state. No M-16-toting Army men anywhere, neither any Abrams tanks nor V-150 armored personnel carriers moving about.
New York is still enjoyed for all its delights – its sights, sounds, and tastes.
A childhood friend who really made it big in the World Capital, Tom Batac, hosted me and the wife to a French feast one night, then to an Italian treat the next. The latter complete with a connoisseur and gourmand in Nino Noto. Ah, the signore’s choice of wine and Tuscan cuisine could have come straight out of Paradiso.
I love New York. Ever.