David Karp/Associated Press
Posted on 09/05/2004 4:44:10 AM PDT by Pharmboy
David Karp/Associated Press
After President Bush's acceptance of the Republican nomination,
workers began the cleanup at Madison Square Garden.
Jan Sweeney, a delegate from St. Paul, seems like the kind of steadfast Republican who would go through Hades itself to support her president, but she was not so sure about New York. Ms. Sweeney eventually decided to risk it, but first she put her affairs in order.
"I have a 7-year-old son, and I actually had a will made up for the first time," she said on the convention floor before President Bush accepted the nomination on Thursday night. "You have to do it in case you get nuked or gassed or whatever."
But after almost a week, Ms. Sweeney was sad about leaving and eager to come back. She cried at ground zero, marveled at the protesters from a distance, and spent a lot of time bonding with New Yorkers, especially the ones wearing badges.
"I felt like if I asked someone to rob me, they would have turned me down," she said. "It was a life-altering experience."
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is hoping that along with all their shopping bags and political paraphernalia, Ms. Sweeney and her compatriots will take home a new respect for a city they feared and thought they hated..
"I think that people would generally agree that New York is an exciting place,'' he said, sitting in the basement of the Farley Building, the city's temporary quarters for visiting journalists. But, he added, "Not everyone would say that New York is a safe place, even though it is one of the safest cities in America."
The police not only kept a lid on things - sometimes in ways that protesters and civil libertarians found transgressive - but they also served as ad hoc street concierges.
In dozens of interviews, delegates and their fellow travelers heaped unstinting praise on police officers, not just for keeping them safe, but for giving them lavish directions or even walking them to their destinations.
While many New Yorkers seem to regard the police as a necessary evil of urban living, much of the country sees the Police Department as a heroic part of America's post-Sept. 11 narrative. And police officers who were walking picket lines and violating noise ordinances over their contract a few weeks ago seemed to feed off the regard heaped on them.
Gayle Belkengren, an alternate delegate from Minnesota, was among the impressed. "You have police who are working 14-hour shifts without a contract, and they had a smile on their face every time I saw them," she said. "They were absolutely wonderful."
More often than not, Ms. Belkengren saw the same face. Police officials made sure that the same officers showed up at the same corners for their shifts for the four days of the convention. "It is the little things like that that end up making a big difference," said Kevin Sheekey, president of the New York host committee for the convention.
In a city where events come and go like subways - is it Fashion Week already? - the size and peculiar majesty of a political event seemed to elicit its own response. The self-selected group of New Yorkers who stuck around for the August heat and the Republican invasion actually paid it some heed, either through protests or by coming down from their offices to see the presidential motorcade on Lexington Avenue on Thursday night.
Jana DiMartino, 42, an alternate delegate from Maui, Hawaii, wearing the delegation's trademark leis on Wednesday evening at the convention hall, is a restaurant manager who knows something about hospitality - and hostility - toward visitors.
"In Hawaii, we have what we call 'stink-eye,' " Mrs. DiMartino explained, narrowing her eyes in a vivid demonstration. "We haven't gotten any stink-eye here."
To some degree, the delegates, many of whom were visiting New York for the first time, romped in a city that does not truly exist. Corseted by a frozen zone in its very middle and semi-deserted elsewhere, Manhattan became a kind of theme park, with delegates and party officials whisked among sparkly functions where their names were always on the list. By design, they lived in a hermetic bubble that was interrupted only by demonstrators at their hotels or on the way to the convention center. And those encounters often seemed more like a thrill ride than a genuine threat.
Don and Brigitt Peterson of Yorkville, Ill., found themselves in a debate at Eighth Avenue and 34th Street with a young man whose shirt suggested that the president was an "international terrorist."
"The protesters don't scare us," Mr. Peterson said later. "They have as much right to be here as we do."
The protester finished, suggested that the city would be a better place without them and walked off. Then a bystander leaned in, according to Mr. Peterson, and said: "Don't listen to that knucklehead. He's probably not even from New York. I am, and you guys are welcome here."
But civic courtesy had its limits. Marolyn Scheffel, a delegate from Parker, Colo., was disappointed that she had been advised by party officials to leave her memorabilia, including a sequined Bush vest and a red, white and blue hat, at home.
"They told us not to wear any of it," Mrs. Scheffel said, "and not to wear our delegate badges, either."
Gordon R. Pederson, 77, a state representative from South Dakota who stands about six-and-a-half feet tall in his white cowboy hat, took the subway to Lower Manhattan to ride the Staten Island Ferry. On the way, he said, a woman interrupted a conversation he was having with a pro-Bush volunteer firefighter from New York. "She gave us an earful from 42nd Street all the way down to the Battery," Mr. Pederson said. "You couldn't print what she said, but she kept going on about big oil, that's why we're in Iraq. And you couldn't even talk to her about it."
But in a city built on the contrary imperatives of strongly held opinions and habitually open minds, a lot of other people found much to talk about. It may not have occurred to New Yorkers who fled the convention that the dread was mutual, but small bridges were built by those who remained. "I went to 'Hairspray,' and I saw it with four demonstrators from California. And so we were sitting there a half-hour early, and we started chatting," said Fran Wendelboe from New Hampton, N.H. "They said, 'We've never met a delegate,' and I said, 'I've never met a protester.' And then we started talking about the issues like abortion and the economy and gay marriage."
The message that New York is both more interesting and much safer than most places was pounded in with a velvet hammer at the media center, where visiting reporters were treated to a spa, complete with hair stylists, masseuses and makeup artists. City officials said they were less concerned about impressing national media outlets than the local reporters from all over the country.
The mayor, in his role as chief marketing officer for the city's tourism industry, dropped by media headquarters for impromptu interviews with radio broadcasters and spent time talking to television reporters from small markets. By using a captive news media, here for the convention, in unconventional ways, the city created a parallel infomercial to match the one the Republicans were creating on behalf of their candidate.
"When it's said that 70 percent of Americans get their news from television, they don't mean CNN and ABC," Mr. Sheekey of the host committee said. "For a lot of Americans, this convention will be what appears on the two minutes of their local evening news.''
Some of those reporters made room for coverage of the various functions to which the delegates had been invited - outings to hit balls at Shea Stadium with the mayor or a visit to the Bronx Zoo. And those who were too busy to cover Mr. Bloomberg's convention curtain-raiser on Broadway were handed broadcast-ready tapes of it soon after it ended. The festivities, along with a convention that was generally seen as a home run for their party, went a long way toward altering perceptions.
"We had delegates who were very apprehensive about coming here," said Pat Kessler, a reporter for WCCO-TV, the CBS affiliate in Minneapolis. "But once they got a couple of days under their belt, the fears evaporated."
Dennis B. Roddy, a columnist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said New York was paradise for a visiting reporter. "Even the bums are media savvy here," he said. But he was amazed that the city even felt a need to burnish its image. "In some inchoate but very real way, everyone in the country is a New Yorker," he said. "After what happened on 9/11, New York may need a hug, but it doesn't need a P.R. campaign."
The city's primary posture, one of engagement no matter who comes to town, remained in place to the end. At 12:30 on Friday morning in front of the New Yorker Hotel, Jerry Caffarello, a gay New Yorker, was having a chat with the Rev. Rob Schenck of Faith and Action, a Washington-based conservative political group.
It was a kind of street kabuki, full of ornate gestures but little finger-pointing between men who seemed to have exactly nothing in common.
"We have a lot in common," Mr. Schenck countered. "We have age, culture and history in common. And we both love New York."
Anna Bahney and John Holl contributed reporting for this article.
There were a lot of cute cops in Penn Station and all over NYC. I wonder where they came from!
This article portrays the GOP delegates as yokels who are going for the first time in their lives to a "big city".
It's kind of sad that we...think about putting our affairs in order before travelng to New York...the threat of terrorism is ever present.
One of 'em was my son...and women have told me that he's "real cute."
_________________________________
Ireland.
hehe!
True, terror is always a possibility, but I go to NYC 6 or more times a year. I went a couple of weeks after 9/11 when Rudy made the appeal for people to come back to NYC to help the economy. I never feel unsafe while in NYC and the people are always friendly and helpful. It's a great place to visit for a day, but as the old adage goes, I wouldn't want to live there.
My son was one of them but we have no Irish blood. Yet we have so many Irish dear friends that we named one of our daughters Caitlin.
Honorary members.
Oh, thank God. I was afraid this thread was about some new effeminate computer.
Proud to be with you...thanks!
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