The air was sticky, the floors wet from the pouring rain. As the crowded A train crawled to a halt at the 34th Street platform, New Yorkers piled onto the subway, stacking themselves shoulder to shoulder as the door barely squeezed closed.
By all accounts, it was a typical Monday morning commute — until a vaguely familiar sound bounced from phone to phone, setting off an orchestra of alarms and glowing lights throughout the train.
It was a text: “WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen.”
The commuters noted the message, then pocketed their phones, resuming their podcasts and Spotify playlists.
Just a few short hours after that alert, Rahami was taken into police custody.
New Yorkers are used to the sirens, the traffic, the armed officers searching through trash cans. They are vigilant. They are always aware what’s happening. But New Yorkers also do what they always do: They keep moving.
“Folks around here… They don’t get scared,” President Obama said on Monday. “They’re tough. They’re resilient.”
Fifteen years after 9/11, quintessentially independent New Yorkers have a way of coming together. They keep their heads down in a quest to get where they’re going. But when danger makes them look up, it’s at each other in solidarity.
“We accept a certain level of risk because we’re awesome as hell and people hate that. We move on because it is what it is,” Brian Sheppard wrote on Facebook.
Twenty nine people were injured when a bomb went off in Manhattan on Saturday night. Earlier that day, an explosion occurred in Seaside Park, NJ. On Sunday night, a backpack with multiple bombs inside was found in Elizabeth, NJ. One of those bombs exploded.
At the site of Saturday’s bombing in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, the barricades are still up, and the police presence is heavy. But the scene is “relatively calm,” according to Misha Lovginov.
“I’d say the mood is a bit intense in Chelsea, but returning back to normal. People are alert and curious, but getting on with their business,” she said.
The market isn’t panicked either. On Monday’s opening, stocks moved higher and traders seemed unfazed.
“We will not allow these types of people and these types of threats to disrupt our life in New York,” Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday. “This is freedom. This is democracy. And we’re not going to allow them to take that from us.”