Stewart Stogel
Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2002

The island of Manhattan became a virtual fortress Tuesday afternoon with the NYPD and U.S. military moving to seal off key streets in midtown.

As police and military helicopters made continuous sweeps over the city skyline, sand trucks were moved into location, blocking access to such well-known city landmarks as the Empire State Building and United Nations headquarters.

Tours to the Statue of Liberty and nearby Ellis Island were suspended and National Guardsmen moved into position in New York's Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station.

At United Nations headquarters and the U.S./U.N. mission across the street on New York's East River waterfront, the Secret Service and the U.S. military began preparing for the arrival of President George W. Bush on Thursday.

Bush, along with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf and Afghan president Hamid Karzai, is scheduled to address the opening of the United Nations 2002 General Assembly.

The NYPD's harbor patrol and the U.S. Coast Guard began positioning ships not only along the U.N.'s waterfront but also at several key bridges, such as the George Washington and Verrazano Narrows bridges. The Narrows bridge, the longest single-suspension bridge in America, straddles the entrance to New York harbor and is the starting point for the annual New York Marathon.

Even New York area post offices were put on alert, a result of the anthrax attacks after 9/11. The United Nations Post Office was ordered shut for at least a week by the U.S. Secret Service.

"No mail in, no mail out," a postal clerk sheepishly informed patrons.

The U.N. facility serves more than 10,000 workers at the world organization's headquarters.

"What can we do?" explained one postal official. "We believe we will be down for a week, but it could be more; the Secret Service is not revealing the details."

While many folks both inside the U.N. and outside began complaining about the security actions, when they thought back to Sept. 11, 2001, those complaints quickly vanished. And as New Yorkers are famed for doing, they just accepted the restrictions and tried to move about the Big Apple as best they could.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Homeland/Civil Defense
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