Safety First at Economic Meeting

Street protests, airport-style X-ray machines and a blue sea of police uniforms greeted dignitaries as they arrived Thursday for the opening of the World Economic Forum.

Security was so tight that even the guests--a who’s who of the worlds of business, diplomacy, academia and media--had to go through metal detectors to enter the hotel. They were issued special interactive identification passes encoded with their photograph and pertinent data.

While corporate chieftains and others waited, the cards were scanned and their pictures appeared on a television screen.

The extensive precautions were intended to prevent anti-globalization demonstrators from disturbing the conference attendees, who were protected not only by police, the FBI and Secret Service but by scores of private bodyguards.

“There were four levels of security. There were dogs. There were people with submachine guns inside and outside the hotel. The security check was as extensive as I have ever seen,” said Robert L. Dilenschneider, a public relations executive who has attended the conference, normally held in Davos, Switzerland, for more than 15 years.

“I had to take the wallet out of my pocket, my pens, my money clip,” he said. “I wear suspenders. We had a little bit of a discussion whether my suspenders set off the machine.”

Inside the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where the conference is being held, the atmosphere was relaxed even though employees ranging from managers to waiters and maids wore serious-looking identification badges designed to prevent intruders. While delegates mingled, visited hospitality suites and attended meetings, it was evident that detectives were guarding lobbies, hallways, elevators and staircases.

Participants were also screened when the conference was held in Davos, but the limited access by road and by railway made it easy to seal off that village.

In populous New York, however, police banned traffic on a broad swath of streets near the hotel. On some of the blocks, officers turned away people who couldn’t show proof that they were either attending the meeting, were residents or worked in the area.

This produced complaints from some owners of shops and restaurants who said the precautions caused profits to plummet. Business was so bad that some stores just closed.

“It is killing me. It’s a disaster,” lamented Silvio Gamba, the owner of Cinquanta, an Italian restaurant near the hotel. “They say this meeting will pump millions of dollars into the city, but I have 20 employees for three tables.”

But other nearby restaurants prospered as corporations entertained conference guests.

“When I went to a reception at the Four Seasons for Allied Security and had lunch, the security going in and out was intense,’ Dilenschneider said.

At times, the police presence overshadowed demonstrations--expected to grow over the weekend--protesting globalization and other causes. The meeting ends Monday.

Workers in offices along Park Avenue gazed down from windows at a dozen members of the Friends of the Earth group. Nearby, in a cold but light rain, several hundred practitioners of the Falun Gong movement--a religious group that the Chinese government has banned--chanted and performed exercises.

In the late afternoon, about 1,000 union members and other demonstrators marched to a Gap store on Fifth Avenue to protest labor practices and low pay for workers at the chain’s suppliers abroad.

“The global economy does not work for the working people,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said at a meeting before the rally began.

Police have promised a swift and massive response to violence such as occurred during anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle; Genoa, Italy; Philadelphia; and Quebec City.

On Thursday, police made eight arrests, including five women who were charged with trespassing and reckless endangerment for climbing to the rooftop of a building in lower Manhattan and displaying a banner saying, “Bush and big biz agree that people with AIDS drop dead.”

Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who assured forum organizers in October that he was confident that the city’s 40,000-member police force could deal with all contingencies, repeated his message Thursday while attending the conference.

“The Police Department and the infrastructure you see here is used to handling a meeting like this,” he said. “I expect the meeting to be peaceful, and I expect if it isn’t, it will be handled very, very quickly and you won’t even know it.”