CRIME

While most of New York was busy with St. Patrick’s Day, I went down to the West Village to see The Wind That Shakes the Barley at the IFC. I had about an hour to kill so I took the opportunity to head over to where the shootings occurred last week, a mere couple of blocks from where I was. It might have been morbid curiosity; I did the same thing after the massacre happened on Capitol Hill last year. In both instances I certainly wasn’t expecting to see some kind of bloodbath, it was more to get a grasp on the reality of the situation the news always seems to remove you from.

Sullivan Street, where the auxiliary officers were shot, was oddly empty of people and traffic. People passed the large flower arrangement memorial without really paying much attention to it. I saw the camera on top of the Children’s Aid Society that filmed the shootings, and in the spot in front where the first office was shot trash bags were piled up in the street mixed in with the dirty snow. Someone died here and you’d never know. Hundreds of bullets were fired but there wasn’t any evidence I could see. No pockmarked walls or shot out windows. It was simply a haunting and melancholy place that gave away very little information of what had happened there.

The leather goods store on Bleecker Street, where the gunman was finally gunned down, had taped over the bullet holes in its windows to keep them from breaking, and crowds moved along the sidewalk with their kelly-green accouterments, seemingly oblivious to the invisible death scene below their feet.

Millions of people live here, life goes on, and aside from the occasional conversation, only the media really keeps things on the mind of the public. In a few days something else will come along, the stories will end, people will forget. That’s just how it is.