COURT TV ONLINE - TOP NEWS

Updated September 12, 2001, 2:37 p.m. ET

City that never sleeps is eerily quiet

NEW YORK (AP) — Prayer services replaced baseball games and Broadway matinees. People walked along deserted streets normally clogged with cars and buses. Construction workers who dig foundations instead dug for corpses.

New Yorkers found themselves Wednesday in a strange city, its normally frantic atmosphere gone. Bicyclists pedaled down the center lanes of broad avenues as pedestrians, some with teary eyes, passed shuttered restaurants and stores.

"It's just eerie," contractor John Sullivan said outside a midtown Manhattan construction site. He had no idea whether his crew would resume work Wednesday.

"It's not even like a Saturday or a Sunday," he said, "and the people you do see, there's just no life in them."

Many security restrictions on the city's vast transportation system were lifted Wednesday, allowing commuters whose companies did not close for the day to get to work on subways, commuter trains and buses. Many other businesses were closed -- including the entire financial district.

Upper levels of the George Washington Bridge into northern Manhattan were reopened, but other bridges and tunnels remained closed to car traffic, leaving a city famous for its colossal traffic jams absent of drivers honking their horns in frustration.

At a Dunkin' Donuts in midtown, the racks that normally hold hundreds of doughnuts and muffins were empty. Trucks had not been allowed into the city to make the morning delivery.

"There's just coffee," said employee Robert Lopiro. "But everyone understands. They don't even ask what's happened with the doughnuts."

The region's three major airports were closed indefinitely. The Port Authority bus terminal in Times Square was also shut down. There was no mail service at all in lower Manhattan; schools, courts and colleges remained closed. Only essential staff were at the United Nations.

Before leaving Queens for his accounting job in Manhattan, 43-year-old Andy Davino had to convince his two worried sons why he should bother.

"I told them, `Life goes on. You can't be afraid to go out of your house because of something like this,"' Davino said.

Still, Davino was apprehensive as his subway train descended into a tunnel into Manhattan. The five-minute ride underneath the East River seemed longer than ever as Davino wondered whether terrorists might strike again.

"Luckily, the lights didn't even flicker," he said.

Sullivan, 58, had just called his wife, who was thinking of taking a train to Washington to visit a friend whose husband was missing in the Pentagon attack. But first, Sullivan's wife was going to an 8:30 a.m. Mass.

"She's going to pray for everybody, not just him," Sullivan said.

In lower Manhattan, Felipe Baez, a 37-year-old construction worker from the Bronx who had volunteered to poke through rubble near the Trade Center to find the dead, had to leave after discovering the charred body of a woman.

"After awhile, I just couldn't take it," he said. "It's got my mind messed up now."