A week that defied convention

The Republicans are leaving today, and New York is getting back to its own business. Liberal Democrats, who fled to places like the Hamptons, are flocking home. Many might even forgo the last weekend at their hugely expensive summer homes and reclaim their Manhattan early: There are movies to be seen at the Lincoln Plaza art theater, dim sum to be had downtown, and fall clothes to be pulled off the racks at Bergdorf’s and Barneys.

These prisoners of the Hamptons, like Napoleon leaving Elba, will no doubt be racing on the highways all weekend. When they return, they’ll find storekeepers who want to kiss their feet. The city, beyond the frozen zone around Madison Square Garden, was shockingly quiet. There wasn’t a pleasure boat on the Hudson River or a commercial plane overhead. Really, you could lie down in the middle of Madison Avenue. You could get a taxi. But this is no commentary on the Republican visitors. They did not disappoint. They were clean, cordial and friendly, and every time the schedule said “party” they were hammering back the Jack Daniel’s.

For their part, the New Yorkers who remained did exactly as Mayor Bloomberg had asked them to do: 99.999999% of us behaved.

Now, as the delegates pack up the hot item of the convention -- gray and black $10 John Kerry flip-flops -- and the entire New York City police force puts in for R&R;, a few last impressions:

New Yorkers misbehaving

It was pretty embarrassing witnessing Michigan delegates shouted down as they ambled up 6th Avenue their first morning in New York.

Fresh off the plane in blue blazers and khaki pants and with newly issued GOP credentials swinging from their necks, the visitors were confronted by a few tall guys wearing all black. They spotted the obvious partisans, pulled bright pink whistles on strings out from under their T-shirts and started blowing them in the Republican faces. “Fascists!” they screamed between blows. “Go home!” they demanded, angrily pointing and running toward them. The Michigan men looked stunned but kept walking. After a few minutes, the whistlers, unable to engage or even rouse their victims, gave up and turned around.

This was offensive. New Yorkers have a well-earned reputation for rudeness, aggressiveness and relentless narcissism. (I could go on.) But never do you see such contempt on the sidewalk. Usually people who scream like that are carted off to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric evaluation or rounded up, with their shopping carts in tow, and led to a nearby precinct for the night. They are not part of the political dialogue. And how dare those whistle-heads wear black.

The people whom New York might want to claim as its own were the protesters in that three-mile line last Sunday. Many looked and acted like New Yorkers, if it were possible for New Yorkers to have one look and be reduced to one behavioral stereotype. They were students and literary agents and preschool teachers and exhibitionists. They brought their children. They carried newspapers. They talked, endlessly. They occasionally waved placards that displayed wit like “Nixon Was Better,” “Re-defeat Bush” and, the winner for pointless, random sarcasm, “Gigolos for Kerry.”

The New York City police, at least until mid-Thursday, were receiving grudging praise from civil liberties types. By Thursday morning they had made just shy of 2,000 arrests, ticked off a lot of protesters by nipping their activities in the bud, and gotten testy with working reporters inside the convention hall. This is a hard city, and the bar is high; yet even as the protesters hurled relentless abuse and made fun of them for not having a contract, the cops mostly kept their tempers in check. In the face of incredible provocation they remained, well, New Yorkers.

Orchestrating Sept. 11

And now for the toughest question of all: Were we exploited or honored by the Republican focus on the events of Sept. 11?

First, I asked Lt. Tim O’Neill of Greenwich Village’s Ladder 5 company, which lost 11 men that day. The lieutenant helped lead the firefighters who survived through some very difficult times after Sept. 11. Then he retired. Now he’s home rebuilding his own life on Staten Island. “Politicians exploit everything, no matter what the situation,” said O’Neill. “If Rudy G. talks about it, he lived it. If George Bush talks about it, I have no problem ... because really, there’s a fine line between exploitation and talking about history. This week, they talked history.”

He didn’t care that a mammoth “September 11, 2001” sign was on the podium, not far from the Republican National Party sign, Monday night; nor was he bothered by the obvious orchestration of having somber blue lights bathe the convention hall as three victims’ relatives told their stories.

But other New Yorkers were offended by those who came here to use our experience to champion their views, such as intolerance to gays, to women’s reproductive rights and to cultural pluralism -- all of which, frankly, most New Yorkers find abhorrent. GOP conservatives, said one outraged friend of mine, “have more in common with the Taliban they pretend to denounce than they do with secular humanists. And no matter what you believe or what religion you observe, if you live in New York, you’re essentially a secular humanist.”

I didn’t have an easy time in that blue light Monday night. The speeches, the wrenching singing of “Amazing Grace” and the outsized police presence made me re-experience the distress, the heartbreak and the fear that linger in New York and will forever.

It was genuinely painful, both to have the thwack, thwack, thwack of police helicopters outside my bedroom window all week and to see an event that redefined our lives reduced to a theme night at the convention. As in: Monday was 9/11 night, Tuesday was moderate Republican night, Wednesday was conservative Republican night and last night was devoted to the president.

For as a New Yorker, it didn’t matter how close or far you were from the towers that day -- I was two blocks from them -- the terror is thinner-than-skin away; 9/11 still sits like a lump. So when a non-New Yorker at a cocktail party this week started talking about the threat of terrorism in Wyoming, I had to force myself to be polite.

Worlds in collision

It was disappointing to learn that a lot of the conventioneers didn’t venture to places like Queens and Harlem in tours organized for them by New York’s host committee and tourist bureau. A scant 20 Republicans showed up for a show at the famous Apollo Theater and a soul-food lunch at nearby Sylvia’s in Harlem. Still, while you can’t expect newcomers to fully inhabit this city that enticed them from their hometowns, worlds did occasionally and happily collide. Late Wednesday night 28-year-old Kim Preston of Indiana and a friend set out in SoHo to find the real New York. They randomly walked into a half-empty restaurant on Spring Street.

“We walk in and it’s, like, all men, and we think, ‘Oh dear, it’s a gay bar,’ ” Preston recalled the next day.

But she was wrong. “We got several compliments from the guys,” she said, giggling. They also got plenty of friendly advice. The bartender and another patron made them a long list of great neighborhoods and restaurants to check out. They also talked politics and mostly disagreed with the New Yorkers.

“They don’t like our president,” said Preston, who is press secretary for the Indiana Republican Party. “They could articulate it real well -- they think he’s a cowboy; they don’t trust him. Our response was ‘Well, we don’t agree with everything he does, but we support him.’ They were impressed that not everyone is hard-core, right-wing Republican.”

The Indianans later exchanged business cards with the New Yorkers and received an invitation to check out Nobu, a chic downtown restaurant where one of those New Yorkers is a chef. The Indianans also learned they had more in common with these local folks than they thought.

Like so many who are drawn from the middle of America to this city of dreams, one guy was from Missouri and one was from Michigan.