ANOTHER WORLD L.A. STAYS COOL AS NEW YORK QUAKES, WORRIES.

Byline: Joseph Honig Local View

NEW YORK - I wish this were a sweeter, more optimistic story. I wish it began with a Gershwin tune and recorded a glorious summer weekend in the capital of the world.

But it doesn't. It can't.

Because if I am perfectly honest - though terribly unscientific - I must report the worry and anxiety among lifelong friends who call New York home.

While we Angelenos glory in the Lakers and unyielding sunshine - most of us blissfully immune to the specter of home-front carnage - there is unsettling dread in the words and faces of so many I know in New York. Surely, they are not a representative sample. And certainly, they do not span the ages, races, occupations and incomes of this great city.

But their emotions, as revealed to me, run from fear to resignation to a kind of gallows humor. They are waiting for the next shoe to drop.

``I am planning a drive to Jersey to see my son,'' a longtime pal told me. ``That is, if the tunnel's still standing.''

``When I enter a restaurant, I look first for the exit sign and then for my husband,'' another advised.

``No one feels like themselves anymore above the 40th floor,'' a third friend suggested.

These people are hard-working, level-headed souls, anything but alarmists.

They are simply convinced they live inside America's bull's-eye.

They watch commercials for radiation detectors and don't feel wacky for wondering whether to spend the $150.

Like Britons or Israelis, they spend inordinate amounts of cell phone time checking in with children and parents.

They buy too much food.

They think twice before going to theaters or ballparks.

All this while so many of us at land's end carry on our leisure and recreation without thoughts of shopping malls or movie multiplexes or office buildings crashing down around us.

You would think we'd know better. You would think that cops and emergency officials wouldn't be the only Californians urgently concerned with terror.

After all, it was the sudden instinct of a custom's official that prevented an L.A.-bound infiltrator from dynamiting our international airport.

One wonders, though, whether that is now just a faraway memory to most residents of this territorial imperative.

For as many times as New Yorkers expressed trepidation about hometown targets - Grand Central Station, the Empire State Building, Wall Street - I can't recall my Los Angeles friends wondering whether Century City or the Hollywood Bowl will remain standing tomorrow.

Three thousand miles from Broadway, so many of us still think of the attack on New York as a television broadcast. After all, as neighbors have told me, we aren't the center of commerce or finance or communications.

We are simply L.A., they intoned, land of imagination and desire.

What would be gained by blowing us to pieces? I've been asked.

There are, of course, ten thousand answers to that question. Many make sense. Many don't. It must be said, however, that when it comes to palpable worries about explosives and dirty nukes and mass homicides, so many in our City of Angels have taken a pass.

In New York, where I grew up and learned how the world works, the first things you notice now about people on the streets are their eyes. They dance and dart about from stranger to stranger. Does this passer-by look normal and rational? Does this one look like trouble?

Who can say? Who knows for sure? Manhattan today is a land of profilers.

And Los Angeles remains the capital of cool.