“The attack yesterday morning, in which a man released two smoke bombs inside a car on a northbound N train and opened fire, injured 23 people — 10 by gunfire. And in an instant, it turned the subway — New York City’s quotidian icon — into a bloody scene of horror.

Tuesday evening police named a “person of interest” in the shooting, Frank James, without releasing any details about him. They asked for help from the public in locating him.

As police searched for the gunman who perpetrated the mass shooting on a subway — a nightmarish scenario that until now the city had avoided — officials and subway riders alike began to grapple with what the attack might mean for the future of the city’s transit system, and New York itself. Their subway, once the target of mundane gripes over tardiness and trash, had become the latest symbol of a city frayed by violence.

On Tuesday afternoon, Hagar Hassan, 20, an electrical engineering student at the College of Staten Island, emerged from the subway shaken after finishing her job at a bank in midtown Manhattan.

“It was terrifying to be on the train,” she said. “I thought: Maybe he’s here.”

An increase in violent crime has plagued New York’s subway system since the beginning of the pandemic, deterring riders and prolonging a pandemic-fueled drop in overall ridership. In 2021, rates of violent crime in the subway per million weekday passengers spiked almost across the board compared with 2019, before the pandemic. Felony assaults in the system rose nearly 25 percent.”

New York City’s subway has indeed always been its “quotidian icon”.  I started taking the subway everyday in 1959 when I was twelve years old to go to school in the South Bronx.  It is sad to see this happen!

Tony