New Yorkers seek normalcy in a post-9/11 world

NEW YORK — It was Sept. 11, and in Central Park, a little girl too small to know what that means soared above Manhattan in an airplane suspended from wires, giggling as the concrete skyline wheeled around her.

The wind whipped 3-year-old Eve Dell'Aquila's hair Sunday as the airplane ride at the Victorian Gardens amusement park picked up speed. A few miles away, the nation's leaders were mourning the dead of the 2001 terrorist attacks in a somber ceremony watched by millions around the world. Her mother, Kelly Dell'Aquila, said they'd visit the memorial another time. Today, she said, "just seems like a good day to remember we're alive."

In Central Park, a man dressed in nothing more than purple bicycle shorts danced in place, as apparently oblivious to passing joggers as they were to him. On Seventh Avenue, a female rapper in platform shoes and knee-length dreadlocks threw down rhymes accompanied by a drummer who played on plastic buckets.

"How you doing? How you doing? You got a job and that's a great thing to be pursuing!" she rhymed at a man carrying a bundle of newspapers on his bicycle. The man kept looking straight ahead, but cracked a smile.

"I know it's Sept. 11, but it's also a great morning," said the rapper, who goes by The Artist Annisha. "We have to stay positive here."

This was hardly a normal day, coming 10 years to the day after the terror attacks that changed the country and seemed to irreparably wound the nation's largest city.

But despite the tight security in lower Manhattan, much about Sunday seemed strangely normal. Or at least, as normal as New York gets.

On Broadway, Sean Harris sat on the sidewalk with an outstretched paper cup, hoping for change. The New York state troopers brought in to guard against terrorism had left him alone, he said. The night before he had slept in the La Guardia airport terminal, undisturbed by police.

"I think people have calmed down here in New York," Harris said. "People are probably more worried about the economy than terrorism."

It may also be a survival strategy in a city that has been targeted over and over again since Sept. 11 — in plots to blow up the city subways, bomb Times Square, ignite a fuel depot at John F. Kennedy International Airport and bomb synagogues. A tip about an al-Qaida plot to detonate a car bomb in either Washington or New York around the anniversary put more armed police into train stations and airports and set the city on edge again.