New Yorkers have grown used to bomb scares since the World Trade Center attacks on September 11. Generally they greet the news with a mixture of boredom and grudging acceptance.
When the alerts go up, the subways come to a standstill, the roadblocks are put up and the National Guard comes back onto the street.
For most New Yorkers it means the difference between a quick journey home and an extra hour at work waiting for the threat to be lifted.
For residents and workers of Chinatown, however, it means another few dozen jobs on the line and the further threat of economic despair. The effects of the World Trade Center terror attacks have been felt all over the US economy, and particularly in New York, in the form of lower consumer confidence, lower investor confidence and a more pronounced dip in an already sliding GDP. But in Chinatown the cruel acts of the hijackers have conspired to provide a triple whammy of bad luck, decimating precisely the three main pillars of its economic survival: the tourist, restaurant and garment industries.
While all parts of the city have seen a decline in tourism since the attacks, few neighbourhoods depend on it as much as Chinatown. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce estimates that about a third of the economy of Chinatown depends directly on tourists. The usually bustling neighbourhood's souvenir shops, Chinese goods stores and electrical stores used to do a brisk trade on the back of visitors who were attracted to the area's cultural colour, its historic buildings and its general ambience of animated chaos.
Tourists also traditionally helped prop up another major sector of the local economy, the restaurants. New York City's tourist guides tell visitors that Chinatown has more restaurants per square foot than anywhere else in the Big Apple.
But the bomb scares, the anthrax scares and the generally pessimistic mood of the nation has prevented large numbers of American tourists from travelling anywhere, including Manhattan's Chinatown.
"There are estimates that the downtown area has lost up to 150,000 jobs as a direct result of the attacks," says Catherine Freed, the neighbourhood's elected representative on the city council If that's so, Chinatown is going to account for a good chunk of that. People just aren't coming here anymore because they are scared, and that's killing Chinatown."
Other neighbourhoods of Manhattan are more diversified economically and are managing to keep their heads above water. Although about 70,000 jobs were displaced by the destruction of the World Trade Center, most of them were migrated to other offices within the downtown area or at least to the towering canyons of Midtown Manhattan. The net loss to the downtown area was not as great as originally feared.
Similarly in Midtown, where high-turnover retailers, high-class hotels and high-powered businesses are insulated by a still buoyant demand for luxury goods and services, the attacks' negative effects on the local economy have so far been relatively muted.
But Chinatown has no such safety nets. With its economy already on the slide before the hijackers even began preparing their deadly scheme, the attack simply made the neighbourhood's fortunes look as murky as the clouds of dust and soot that the collapsing twin towers rained on its narrow streets.
"We are down to less than 60% of what we were doing before the attack," says Spencer Chan, who owns the Sweet N Tart restaurant in Mott Street, in the heart of Chinatown. His restaurant serves a westerner-friendly menu and was popular with downtown workers and tourists.
"Now there are no tourists and with fewer workers downtown now, we have seen our custom fall," Chan adds.
Already, he says, dozens of smaller restaurants have folded, unable to sweat out the drop in demand. Chan has had to lay off a third of his staff.
"The first two weeks were terrible. I would say business fell 80%. If it doesn't get any better by the middle of the year, I fear I will have to close the Manhattan store," says Chan, who owns another branch of his popular restaurant in Flushing, a Chinese neighbourhood in Manhattan's neighbouring borough, Queens. Although Chinatown is sufficiently far away from downtown to have been spared the physical devastation the attacks wrought, it is close enough to have been sucked into the vacuum of infrastructural despair that was left.
When a giant steel girder fell from high up in the North Tower of the World Trade Center and pierced the surface of Church Street hundreds of feet below, it smashed a hole into the Chambers Street subway station below. That forced transport chiefs to close off part of the subway system to allow repairs to be made. The closed-off area included Chinatown.
It left the neighbourhood with no subway links for two months after the attack.
"Nobody could come in and nobody could get out without a great deal of effort," says Freed. "So people, even Chinese who had family in Manhattan Chinatown, just stayed away."
Chinatown was already suffering because of a July subway realignment that closed its main station, Grand Street, in order to aid repairs on the nearby Manhattan Bridge.
But the recent closures proved the last straw for some businesses. "There was nobody coming here," says Chan. "That's why so many stores had to close."
The strain the attacks put on the subway system were nothing, however, compared with that put on the road system. Immediately after the trade center collapsed, all of New York was declared a disaster zone and every access tunnel and bridge was closed for two days. When the ring of steel was eased, it was only done to allow traffic into upper Manhattan. Lower Manhattan became a ghost town overnight. Worse, even when motorists were allowed back into the southern neighbourhoods, the main feeder routes into Chinatown from New Jersey and Brooklyn - the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge - remained closed: the bridge because of traffic snarl ups, and the tunnel to allow easy exit from Manhattan for the trucks that hauled the thousands of tonnes of World Trade Center rubble to the scrap heaps.
"The area was inaccessible and that really hurt the garment trade," says Freed. "It relies on the easy access of trucks to get the garments from the factories and to the stores uptown.
"It was that quick turnaround time that gave the Chinatown garment factories their advantage over cheaper competitors elsewhere. But with the roads closed, they no longer had that advantage."
Such problems were not confined to the immediate aftermath of the attacks. They are still felt each time a bomb scare is issued and the roadblocks are put back in place and security is beefed up.
"One day the traffic will be okay and the trucks can get in and out, but the next there will be a scare of some sort and the barricades will go across the streets and the National Guard will stop trucks and ask for ID," says Rocky Chin, a local human rights lawyer associated with the Chinatown branch of the garment trade union, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (Unite).
The garment industry has been suffering for a long while, as cheaper imports from other Nafta (North American Free Trade Agreement) regions and Asia flooded the market and dotcoms forced up the cost of rents and squeezed the factories from their traditional manufacturing neighbourhoods.
"The garment shops have not been having a good time of it and this has just made things much worse," says Chin. "I know many garment shops have had to close down and hundreds of people have lost their jobs."
The hardships are being felt not only by businesses, but also by local residents. Telephone lines went down when the local switching station was buried in the rubble of the collapsed twin towers and much of the area was left without electricity for a month because the thousands of tonnes of fallen rubble had crushed subterranean power cables.
Two months later only 80% of the phone service had been restored and many of the neighbourhood's public housing estates suffer intermittent power losses as utility companies continue to tinker with the damaged supply lines.
The neighbourhood's health is also suffering, as the smoke from the still-smouldering rubble continues to waft from downtown into neighbouring areas raising fears of bronchial problems and asbestos poisoning.
And to make things even more uncomfortable for residents, the north tower of the trade center took with it the main television broadcast mast for most of the city's terrestrial TV stations, leaving viewers a choice of just two channels instead of the usual dozens they had enjoyed.
"It really is like living in a war zone down here," says councillor Freed, who has suffered recurring bronchitis as a result of the smoky air. "The business has gone and people are losing jobs and to make matters worse their homes are still in a state of disrepair."
The Federal Emergency Aid and Benefit Agency, (Fema) that has been instrumental in getting affected neighbourhoods back on their feet, was late in establishing an office in the area, Freed says. "When it did, they only had operatives who could speak English and Spanish. We had to go down there and ask them to find someone who could speak some Chinese. Now the line of people queuing outside their office needing help goes down the street."
There is no easy response to the situation, all involved agree, but they do feel that things could be made easier if only the authorities weren't constantly overlooking Chinatown.
"Chinatown was apportioned only US$2 million of the money raised to help restructure the city, and while I'm not saying it is the most needy, it is more needy than that sum suggests," Freed says.
"Of course the directly affected areas need the most help, but there has been little help forthcoming for the small businesses here. While the big businesses are getting bailed out, the smaller businesses in Chinatown - and Chinatown is built on small businesses - are being urged to get loans.
"Naturally, when business is so poor, the last thing anybody wants is another loan to have to pay if their company has to fold."