From the South Street Seaport, it doesn’t take long for me to cross the river and get to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I head straight for the strip of the avenue that, before Times Square, was a thriving Arab neighborhood. Full of markets, scent shops, religious bookstores, you name it. You could hear the call to prayer on loudspeakers all day. Mosques filling up with the faithful. That’s all gone now. The mosques, the markets, the bookstores. Along with pretty much everything else. Atlantic Avenue is also where a half dozen men hatched the plot against Times Square. Five men in a backroom under a bare bulb, with a sixth man, arrested later, funneling funds from overseas. Who knows how exactly they planned it. I never sought out the stories afterward. Never cared too much about the who, what, and why of it. Especially the why. By then, I’d pretty much lost my faith in why. So I never learned the exact address of the building that housed the meeting that hatched the plot to explode a dirty bomb in Times Square.
