You just wouldn’t know.
On an unseasonably warm November afternoon, as New Yorkers swoosh by on bicycles, some with young kids on the back, others riding the distinctively sky-blue shareable Citi bikes, you just wouldn’t know that 48 hours previously this exact spot was the setting of unthinkable carnage.
You wouldn’t know that eight cyclists on this very West Side bike path became the latest victims of Isis’s global effort to instill fear in the hearts of ordinary people. You wouldn’t know that a path enjoyed by thousands of New Yorkers every day as they ride or jog their way along the lapping waters of the Hudson river had been turned into a mile-long killing run.
Within hours of Tuesday’s Home Depot truck attack more than a million New Yorkers poured back on to the streets for the annual Halloween parade, and countless thousands of other kids and their parent-minders were out trick-or-treating in their neighborhoods. By Wednesday morning, nearby schools that had been in lockdown during the attack were open for business, students and staff making long detours to reach the classrooms.
And by Thursday, the bike path, scene of that deadly drive by an Isis-inspired self-radicalized killer named by prosecutors as 29-year-old Sayfullo Saipov, was clear once more. The cyclists were back out with a vengeance.
“Nothing is going to keep us away from this place, no matter what,” said Dennis Otten, 61, who had cycled down from his home in Midtown as he often does. “This bike lane is so straight, so beautiful, it’s our way of sharing the island with everybody.”
After Tuesday’s attack the mood in the city is so restrained, low-key, that visitors have found it almost bewildering. Sabine Lahmann was landing at JFK from Berlin just as the terrorist suspect was turning his rented Home Depot truck into the bike path at West Houston Street.
Now she is preparing to become one of 50,000 people who will be participating – terrorism be damned – in the New York Marathon on Sunday. After she picked up her running number from the organisers on Thursday she came down to the bike path to witness the crime scene for herself, and was amazed by what she saw.
The path was full of cycles, the pedestrian walkway beside it thrumming with strollers and joggers and the echoing sounds of children’s laughter. There were none of the crowds that she had seen in Berlin after last year’s Christmas market attack.
“It’s strange,” she said. “It seems almost normal.”
It takes time and concentration to get beyond that sense of surreal normality in a city that has just been brutally attacked. But the signs are there if you are open to them. Take the color yellow.
The yellow police crime-scene tape that ran the entire length of the terrorist’s cruel journey down the bike path has been taken down now. But other yellow objects have sprouted up to replace it.
There are the yellow vests stamped on the back with NYPD that officers are wearing as they patrol the bike path, travelling in pairs on their own police cycles. They look almost normal, like the Marathon runner said, and yet not normal.
Similar yellow vests are being worn by a different set of law enforcers – law enforcers for God. “Billy Graham Rapid Response Team” theirs are branded.
They are a team of Billy Graham chaplains who have dashed up to New York City from the televangelist’s headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, to pray with, provide instant spiritual guidance to (and occasionally convert) those traumatised by the attack. Their leader, Jeff Naber, has taken this “law enforcement ministry”, as they call it, to many of the recent sites of terrorist attacks.
London, Manchester, Brussels, Paris, Nice, Munich, Berlin. He was at them all.
The chaplains aim to reach each disaster zone within 24 hours, so they can offer God’s healing power at the time that it is most needed. “The longer you let the emotional hurt fester, the worse it is,” Naber said.
There are other signs of New York’s abnormal normality. As you approach Chambers Street where the killing spree ended you can see tyre marks rising up off the bike path and on to the earthen central reservation.
Two trees beside the path bear deep gashes in their bark where the Home Depot truck crashed past them. Someone has laid flowers at the base of the trees, like “Get better soon” cards.
On the corner of Chambers Street itself, where the truck rammed into a school bus and screeched to a halt, a makeshift memorial has emerged around a street lamp. It is festooned in flowers and an Argentinian flag in honour of the five friends from Buenos Aires who were on a 30-year school reunion when their New York visit – and lives – were cut short.
“Viva Argentina” has been scrawled in chalk on the bike path beside the memorial. Beside it are the words: “Love one another.”
That’s the most overt reference to the tragedy that there is. For the most part, the city is back on its feet and not looking back. The West Side bike path is buzzing with the sounds of bicycle wheels turning.
Including the wheels of Dwight Beady, 66, a retired bank worker who lives in the Bronx and rides all over the city. The day of the attack he cycled to Brooklyn to comfort his mother.
His main emotion since Tuesday, he says, is anger for the victims. Is he intimidated?
“Nah, not much. With attacks like these, what are you going to do? Stay home, fill your days with avoidance? In a big city like this you can’t do that. The way I see it, people don’t get to choose what happens to them – it’s the fickle finger of fate.”
By the Hudson, Steven Portes, 26, is taking a break from studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College located just over the road from the bike path. He’s sitting on a bench looking out at a white yacht bobbing on the river with the Jersey City skyline beyond.
He says he’s more aware of his surroundings since Tuesday’s attack, and finds himself stepping away from large crowds. But that’s about it. He’s surprised by his own composure in the wake of such violence.
“For some weird reason, I’m not scared.”
He has no explanation for his – and the city’s – preternatural calm. “Maybe it’s because these senseless attacks have happened too often now,” he says, “or maybe it’s because New Yorkers are tough people who go about their affairs without fear.”
That’s a good way of looking at it. But which is it? Is it New York’s particular makeup as one of the world’s most diverse metropolises (180 languages are spoken in its public schools), a city above all others founded upon the resilience of its immigrant survivors?
Or are we witnessing a global phenomenon – the world’s new normal – where random acts of terrorist slaughter have become so frequent we are growing accustomed to them?
A pertinent place to ponder that conundrum is at Ground Zero, just four blocks away from where the killer’s truck came to a stop. A day after the attack, a minute’s silence was held here at the Survivor Tree, a callery pear that was found charred and shattered among the rubble of 9/11 but nursed back to life.
The tree now stands a lush 30ft tall close to the footprints of the Twin Towers. They say it’s always the last at Ground Zero to lose its leaves in the fall, and the first to burst into bloom in the spring.
“That tree has become a focus for us as the world has experienced more and more of these terrible events,” said Alice Greenwald, president of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
So how does she explain the city bouncing back so quickly? New York resilience, or new global resignation? “It’s so hard to make sense of the violence,” she says. “It’s so indiscriminate, irrational and random in terms of its victims.”
From where she’s sitting, in the crucible of modern terrorism, the answer is hybrid.
“We’ve seen it time and again – in Nairobi, London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, all around the world – horrific events to which we are becoming inured. But we’ve also learned that people can rebound from personal grief and outrage and show defiance to the terrorists by cherishing life.”
Tuesday on a bike path in New York made it plain. Grief, outrage, affirmation for life. In today’s new normal we get it all.