Photo: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images

345 Park Avenue has always been a flex. On a stately stretch of midtown famed for architectural trophies, the skyscraper seems to shrug and say, “Yeah, what?” Unlike its neighbors, which announce their wealth with modernist swagger or Art Deco glitz, the building is bland and underwhelming, both outside and (apparently) within. One of its most notable features is proximity to a soup kitchen on 51st Street, where an unruly group of homeless lines the block every morning and where a SWAT team pushed me through the door during the initial minutes of the attack. The building flaunts a massive sculpture, of course, but it’s a macabre and slightly threatening Louise Bourgeois conjuring an alien spore, positioned off to the side, next to the mailroom door, where I watched employees escorted by snipers stream out with their hands above their heads. And then there is the sign announcing 345’s marquee tenant, just a little understated logo at eye level, easy to miss, like a family name scribbled on a piece of driftwood at the entrance to an unpaved driveway leading to a seaside estate. “Blackstone,” it says.

The headquarters of the world’s largest asset-management company looks as if it belongs on nearby Third Avenue, where rents are lower, the plazas aren’t as grand, and emergency vehicles bully their way through traffic at all hours. Seeing them at rush hour isn’t unexpected, but not in an assault force of the magnitude of the one that came through last night, headed toward 345, whose other tenants include Rudin Management and the National Football League, neither of which advertises its presence in the building. Midtown East is dense with security. Not just corporate headquarters but foreign embassies and the offices of national politicians proliferate nearby. A police precinct is literally across the street from 345, and on a day like yesterday the surrounding blocks are lined with private vehicles displaying the “Don’t Ticket Me” placards of federal agents and NYPD, FDNY, and other government employees.

Photo: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Yet the area has always been, and will forever remain, chillingly vulnerable to the sort of Mumbai-style blitz that took place yesterday. There are simply too many people in too tight a space for even the combat-honed reflexes of the most hardened ex–Navy SEAL. Not unless the NYPD wants to defile those architectural trophies with checkpoints, wands, pat-downs and airport-style scanners at the perimeter of those stately plazas along Park.

If this morning is any indication, they won’t. With surprising speed, given the scale of the carnage and the dreadful likelihood of copycats, the place has returned to its congested, contested, exposed self. The shed-darkened, garbage-covered, urinous block where I sheltered last night is once again shared space for finance bros getting lunch at food trucks and men getting lunch at the soup kitchen. TV cameras aside, little evidence of the drama remains, even at the spot in the middle of East 51st where I watched police officers perform chest compressions on a victim. I had been walking along Third, avoiding Lexington, which remains nearly as filthy and depressing as it became during the pandemic, when EMTs and plainclothes officers began sprinting by. Midtown lives in pretty much perpetual false alarm, but it quickly became clear that this wasn’t one. “Get down!” the police screamed at pedestrians (who nevertheless didn’t). “There are active shooters on this block.” Soon the streets were barricaded off, the drones and the snipers arrived, and I found myself inside St. Bartholomew’s with a man whose daughter worked at Blackstone. She was trapped inside 345. From across the street he kept scanning the employees exiting the building in bursts. “C’mon, Honey, c’mon.”

Not long afterward, I got a text from a friend who was dining at the Waldorf Astoria a block away. Halfway through his meal, the chef had come out and whispered to him about the assault, being discreet for the sake of my friend’s teenage son, who had been nervous about visiting midtown. Why? I asked. Because of the UnitedHealthcare shooting, he said. They finished their meal and returned to Brooklyn.

Soon the blocks around 345 were frozen, which apparently prompted some people to see if Doordash deliverymen have the authority to penetrate police cordons. However, the only unbadged people moving near 345 were Blackstone and NFL employees, who kept exiting in groups well into the night, some complaining bitterly about the unhelpfulness of the active-shooter measures they had been trained in. “People got their info from this,” one exasperated finance bro told me, holding up a WhatsApp screen. Soon the cops went home too, and as the blocks emptied, they began to regain their cinematic associations. For me, it’s hard to walk along Park without thinking of Jack Nicholson and Candice Bergen in Carnal Knowledge; however, tonight what the area looked like, disturbingly, was an L.A. movie: Heat, whose famous financial-district shootout is said to have inspired real-life copycats. This unease was amplified when I saw the first image of the shooter, whose relaxed, confident gait and attire unmistakably echo Val Kilmer’s. I left wondering whether he planned to become a meme and how potent the one he succeeded in creating will become.

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