City officials, acting upon new, highly specific intelligence on likely terrorist targets here, Sunday ordered heightened security precautions, including a greater police presence on the streets, more vehicle checkpoints and searches and new restrictions on bridge and tunnel traffic into Manhattan.
Acknowledging that New York City has been at its own version of Code Orange, or at high risk of attack, since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declined to further raise the level of alert and urged citizens to go to work as usual on Monday.
Later Sunday, the mayor’s office announced that he would be ringing the opening bell Monday morning at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, one of the three New York City sites named as potential targets.
Bloomberg, in issuing the new citywide security measures, responded to information released Sunday by the Department of Homeland Security, which listed several financial sites in the New York metropolitan area and Washington, D.C. as being vulnerable to attack.
“We are deploying our full array of counterterrorism resources. We will spare no expense and we will take no chances. We will be protecting the city through never-ending vigilance,” Bloomberg said at an afternoon news conference at City Hall.
Watching for car bombs
The nature of the current threat, he said, seemed primarily to be car and truck bombs. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who appeared with Bloomberg, said police also would be watching for backpack-type bombs.
In New York, the target list comprised the distinctive, slant-topped Citigroup headquarters skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, its shimmery, green glass-clad sister tower across the East River in Long Island City and the stock exchange in Lower Manhattan, just blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. Both Citigroup buildings have subway stops under them and the stock exchange has a stop in close proximity.
Across the Hudson River in Newark, N.J., the Prudential Financial headquarters building on Broad Street, which employs some 1,000 people and another 1,000 in a neighboring structure, also was specified and put on a “high” alert standing. By Sunday evening, The Associated Press reported that police had fenced off the building, taken up positions around it and closed off surrounding streets.
Tom Ridge, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, raised the threat level to Code Orange in the nation’s capital, where he said the headquarters of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had been identified as targets.
Security already tight
Bloomberg said he did not raise New York to the highest level of threat because the specificity of the new information applied only to the targets, not the timing. And, he said, arrangements for the Republican National Convention, which opens in midtown’s Madison Square Garden later this month, already call for massive security measures and will proceed as planned.
In terms of overall threat, he reminded New Yorkers that they have “known all along” that symbolic and landmark structures in the city are targets. On Monday morning, he said, they should “get up, get on the subways and enjoy the freedom of New York. Nothing’s changed here.”
But clearly, some physical changes quickly will be evident, many of them reminiscent of the days after the Sept. 11 attacks when heavily-armed police from the city’s Hercules unit patrolled the streets and vehicle checks became common at the city’s bridge and tunnel portals.
Kelly said residents could expect to see greater police presence on the streets and in the subways. He said the city is deploying over 70 special teams of police officers who can quickly converge on a problem area. Corporate security directors of major buildings and institutions also have been told to safeguard heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems against infiltration, he said.
Traffic will slow
Warning of traffic delays, Kelly said that, as of Monday, truck traffic would be banned from the Williamsburg Bridge, the span linking Brooklyn and lower Manhattan; trucks would be diverted south to police checkpoints at the Manhattan Bridge.
Inbound Manhattan commercial traffic in the Holland Tunnel, the southernmost tunnel linking New Jersey and New York City, also will be stopped as of Monday, according to The Associated Press.
More parking structures around the city will be subject to heightened security measures, the officials said. These could include the trunk checks and examination by mirror of vehicles’ undersides that already are in place in crowded locations such as the theater district and the Lincoln Center cultural complex.
