Midtown Manhattan Becomes America's Stage for Acts of Violence
And now, for some, it may be earning an unsettling new distinction: a spot-lit setting for brazen acts of premeditated violence.
On Monday afternoon, a gunman who had driven from Nevada parked his car outside a Park Avenue office tower and took the lives of four people inside. Officials said he was targeting the headquarters of the National Football League, apparently aggrieved by the organization's handling of brain injuries in the sport.
It was a stunning spasm of violence in a city where mass public shootings are exceedingly rare and in a neighborhood that is statistically safer than most others. Yet it was also the latest in a string of incidents in which a person had ventured to the district, the geographical heart of New York, with deadly intent.
The shooting carried unmistakable echoes, for instance, of last December, when a prominent health care executive was murdered on West 54th Street outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel.
Others might have recalled an attack two years before that, when a teenager from Maine traveled to Times Square on New Year's Eve and tried to kill police officers with a machete. Or the men who in 2022 headed into New York City through Penn Station with a Glock 9-millimeter pistol, an extended magazine and a plan for a synagogue massacre.
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