Midtown Manhattan contains multitudes. It is a thrumming center of global commerce, proudly avoided by many locals. It is the mecca of American tourism, a maze of world-famous landmarks routinely swarmed by visitors.
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.
Some residents have grown concerned that a neighborhood whose fortunes have seesawed — most recently struggling to overcome the commercial erosion of the Covid-19 pandemic — could have a new identity as a target for anyone carrying a deadly grievance against some symbol of power.
“It does worry me,” said Daniel A. Biederman, president of the Bryant Park Corporation and the 34th Street Partnership, a pair of business improvement districts in Midtown. “There are so many well-publicized executives out there in this area. New York is where these people are.”
The roughly two and a quarter square miles that make up Midtown have nearly ubiquitous surveillance video coverage — and proximity to the headquarters of many news organizations. People seeking to make a public statement against high-profile individuals or corporations are magnetically drawn there.
“These guys get it in their head that these people are responsible for their problems,” Mr. Biederman said.
Midtown Manhattan, in truth, is a relatively safe area of a relatively safe city, with a robust police presence on its streets and scores of private security guards posted inside its office buildings.
Of the city’s 382 murders last year, only 10 were recorded in Midtown’s two precincts, according to data from the police. And of all major felonies reported in the city last year — murders, rapes, robberies, felony assaults, burglaries, grand larcenies and grand larcenies of automobiles — only about 5 percent were recorded in Midtown.
“In Midtown, and in most of Manhattan, your chances of being harmed personally by crime are quite low,” said Jeffrey A. Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “The people most at risk are in the disadvantaged, economically excluded neighborhoods.”
Midtown — bustling, impersonal, a place to do deals and divert the visitors — has always occupied a complicated place in the hearts of New Yorkers.
Many work in the district. Many would otherwise happily avoid it at all costs.
“New Yorkers view Midtown as a place almost entirely for tourism and business, and if you don’t have a job there, or a dentist, or you’re going to the theater, you really don’t have any reason to be there,” said Sharon Zukin, a sociologist who writes about urban ecosystems. “But for out-of-towners, Midtown is New York; New York is Midtown.”
In this way, its symbolism is strong. The district undoubtedly has a fishbowl quality, amplifying all manner of happenings inside its bounds. And the state of Midtown, however minor a concern it might be for the everyday New Yorker, carries a political resonance of outsize proportion.
City tabloids and cable news shows regularly highlight disturbances, criminal activity and quality-of-life issues on Midtown streets to articulate some larger story. A brawl becomes an existential threat; a single vagrant, a parable for a failing city.
“It’s more important than it was before, as far as outside perception,” Mr. Biederman said of Midtown’s reputation.
The gunman at the Park Avenue office building, Shane Tamura, who shot himself after his killing spree, was a 27-year-old from Las Vegas and a former high school football player. A note discovered in his wallet claimed he had brain trauma and accused the N.F.L. of hiding the game’s physical risks.
Mr. Butts said the case bore a resemblance to that of Luigi Mangione, charged with murder in the assassination of the health insurance executive, a crime that was caught on video and led to a manhunt that became a television sensation.
“Both cases, we have someone engaging in wanton deadly violence against people associated with the business, corporate and the economic engines of the country,” Mr. Butts said.
“It’s a very, very low frequency crime,” Mr. Butts added, but such crimes have a way of establishing a stranglehold on a city’s collective attention span. And for a city like New York, they raise a troubling question: How to stop them?
On Sunday, Mr. Adams stood at a news conference behind tables spilling over with guns. He was there to trumpet the fact that the police had confiscated more than 3,000 illegal firearms in the city since the start of the year.
A day later, that image — the fruit of months of work to remove guns from the streets of New York — was swiftly replaced by the sight of a man calmly approaching an office tower in Midtown with an assault-style rifle dangling at his side.
Mr. Adams was asked during an interview with CNN on Tuesday whether the gunman, who had driven to the city just that morning, had been on the radar of law enforcement.
“He was not on our radar at all,” Mr. Adams said.
Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.
Andrew Keh covers New York City and the surrounding region for The Times.
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