Terror fears bring change to NYC

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Not far from the New York Stock Exchange, a small crowd of tourists stopped to watch as a bomb-sniffing dog checked out a delivery van. The cobblestoned street was blocked by a line of brass cubes with holes that glowed red like the inside of a toaster.

Suddenly an entire section of the street rotated, cobblestones and all. The cubes moved out of the van’s way and their holes turned green. The crowd “ahhed” with surprise.

Welcome to New York, a city where every year since 9/11, tighter security has changed the landscape a little bit at a time, more noticeable to the tourists crowding the streets for the holidays than the residents who have been here all along.

At Radio City Music Hall, guards check holiday tourists’ purses for weapons before the Rockettes’ Christmas Spectacular. In Herald Square, new cameras stare down at shoppers.

In rail stations, travelers are bombarded with messages warning them to be on the lookout for suspicious activity. There are poison-gas sensors and radiation detectors, automatic license-plate readers and random bag searches in the subways.

The Woolworth Building, a 1913 skyscraper that used to attract hundreds of tourists a day to its ornate lobby, now has a sign at the door saying “Tourists Are Not Permitted Beyond This Point.”

Visitors to the Statue of Liberty must go through two separate, airport-style security checkpoints. Taking pictures of the PATH trains that run under the Hudson is illegal. Even the city’s architecture is changing: closed “sky lobbies” are replacing ground-level public spaces; vehicle barriers are de rigueur.

At Rockefeller Plaza, concrete barriers emblazoned with “NYPD” blocked part of the streets running through the promenade, which draws thousands of visitors to see its Christmas tree and ice-skating rink.

In the subways, train conductors tell passengers, “If you see something, say something.” So do posters and ticket machines. Police conduct occasional spot checks, setting up a table in stations and searching travelers’ bags at random.

Times Square — now partly transformed into a pedestrian mall — sports wider sidewalks aimed at creating buffer zones around high-profile buildings. Nearly every lamppost now has at least two domed cameras and an antenna for beaming live images to police.

In a command center that opened in 2008, software searches constantly for suspicious activity, such as an object that does not move for a long time. The computers can also search for specific shapes and colors, such as a suspect wearing a green jacket. In September, police added 500 more cameras to the system.

New skycrapers place office workers higher, beyond the reach of a bomb explosion. In One World Trade Center, the 102-story tower under construction at ground zero, the first office floors will be built 200 feet above the ground.