Like many other Penn students, College senior Liz Wittels went to New York over fall break to visit friends.
She spent her Saturday afternoon shopping and meandering along the city streets, surprised at the amount of World Trade Center paraphanalia replacing normal tourist souveniers. Photos of the two fallen towers were everywhere, as were "I Love New York, Even More" T-shirts and posters.
And, after a day of mindless wandering, Wittels finally felt the need to visit Ground Zero.
"I had to go see it," Wittels said of her attraction to the site. "I was drawn to it for some reason and wanted to see it for myself after seeing it second-hand through the news."
Images from magazines and television broadcasts were not enough to prepare her for the reality of southern Manhattan. The checkpoints and extra police were obvious signs of a difference, but it was the less obvious changes that were most upsetting.
"It was so disturbing," Wittels said. "There were people, tourists, everywhere. They had cameras and were snapping pictures of the huge empty space." Flowers and pictures of lost friends and family members dotted the police lines.
"The feeling in that area was incredibly sad," Wittels said.
Some onlookers had even suspended their cameras from long poles, dangling them precariously over the gathered crowd, trying to get a shot of something that was no longer there.
SoHo, normally, bustling with college-age shoppers searching for trendy new fashions, was much quieter than usual.
And while both Saturday and Sunday were beautiful days in the city, Central Park was not nearly as crowded or lively as would usual on a fall weekend.
"The park was empty," Wittels said. "The mood was so glum, everyone seemed less inclined to relax and have fun."
Despite the changes, Armando Morales, a College sophomore, still enjoyed his first trip into New York and was surprised at the lack of obvious tensions after several anthrax scares over the weekend.
"There were more police and National Guard around," Morales said. "But on the whole it seemed like everyone was pretty positive and not giving in to too much of the paranoia as I would have expected."
Itineraries for various student trips included the standard museum visits, shopping, site-seeing and bar hopping. But for some, the entire city felt different, its pace a little slower and its mood changed in ways difficult to express.
"It was strange to see the city move at such a slow pace," said Engineering senior Matt McAllister, who took Amtrak in on Friday night. "The energy was still there, but it was a little less than before."
College senior Marissa Kase lived in the East Village this summer while she worked as an intern for Sesame Street. This past weekend she passed up the opportunity to visit her favorite downtown bars, opting instead to remain above 40th Street for the duration of her trip and meet friends at a bar on the Upper East Side, rather than head down to Union Square.
Daytime activities were similarly analyzed and some were stricken from the list of things to do after consideration of possible consequences.
"Well, my plans to go to various museums were curtailed due to my own fears," Kase said.
For some Penn students, New York itself didn't even make the cut, after the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a warning last Thursday that the weekend could bring more terrorist attacks.
"I decided that traveling would be too much of a hassle," said College senior Victoria Taylor, who had made plans to go, but instead remained in Philadelphia for break. "I had seen the F.B.I. issue a warning and I thought it would be a lot more trouble than it was worth."
