At a few minutes after 1 p.m., the streets of Washington Heights were oddly empty, and the reason was not the cold. Death had arrived again from the New York skies."Not again, not again," a woman named Elsa Alvarez said, standing outside Mico Travel & Mayatours, just off 172nd St. and Broadway. She waved a gloved hand in a hopeless way. "How could this happen again?"

Like millions of others, she was thinking that American Airlines Flight 587 to Santo Domingo had been brought down by terrorists. She hurried away to watch television at home. By then, it was clear that 260 human beings were on board the doomed flight, most of them Dominicans.

Almost certainly, some of them came from Washington Heights, where so many Dominicans have chosen to live. All of them must have departed in overcoats believing they would have lunch in T-shirts.

A woman in the travel agency said the 8 a.m. flight from Kennedy Airport went for a bargain fare: $318 plus tax. "It was a very good price," she said, "but we don't know yet if we sold a ticket to one of our customers." There were no passenger lists yet, and there was talk that the flight was oversold. Nobody yet knew who had boarded the flight and who had not. "It's just too early."

On Channel 41, there were scenes of flame and destruction in Belle Harbor, Queens, just beyond the farthest terminal of the A train that could be boarded at 168th St. in Washington Heights.

In the uptown restaurants and bars, Dominicans stared at television sets. I saw one young woman in a light green sweater burst out of a building on 174th St., weeping, and run across the street to another apartment house. To vanish into the hallway. Beyond talk. Beyond consolation.

Another Test

Through apartment windows, you could see other women with intense faces talking into telephones. In check-cashing stores, bodegas, shoeshine parlors, people watched television and said little. The usual joking style was gone. The music was gone. Everyone wanted details and many seemed to fear them.

"You know, everybody got to know somebody on that plane, man," said a young man named Robert Vasquez. He shook his head. "Too much. Too much."

We indeed seem to be in our Job year, enduring inexplicable tests. Steel girders still burn at 1,000 degrees in the furious guts of the ruined World Trade Center. And here was another calamity, on another day of clear morning skies.

The cops, firefighters and neighbors in Belle Harbor, out on the Rockaway Peninsula, worked with extraordinary skill to save lives, to cage fire. But now we would have still another round of funerals.

I wandered into Coogan's, on 168th St., one of the great New York institutions. Here the Irish and the Dominicans have merged over the years, at the bar and in the restaurant.

They've laughed with each other and argued with each other and married each other. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, there are bilingual karaoke nights. Each year, there's a Salsa Blues and Shamrocks Run. Now, the flames of Belle Harbor were on the TV set. Dave Hunt, who runs the place, came over.

"It's so sad," he said. "So very sad."

There were framed photographs on the walls, of prizefighters and ballplayers, hero cops and firemen, Irishmen and African-Americans and Dominicans. The old sign was there, too: "Help Wanted. No Irish Need Reply." The old insult, now laughed away.

But the sign was a reminder of why the Dominicans and the Irish get along so well these days in Washington Heights. Somewhere, at some time in this city, a year ago or a century ago, each group has had to put up with idiocy. They've had to eat humiliation to feed their children. They've had to listen to scurrilous libels. But they know each other now in places like Coogan's. And the Dominicans on that airplane were doing what the Irish have done for generations: going off to the Old Country.

If the Dominicans went to the Old Country in this strange, fearful off-season, instead of at Christmas, it was to save money. If they chose that early flight, showing up early because of the heavy security after Sept. 11, that, too, was to save money. They weren't bone-poor. Many were doing very well, gracias.

Finer Things

But money saved on the flight was money that could be used for the things of life. For gifts and food and drink and dancing. For laughter. For two entire weeks without labor. For reunions with old friends and aging parents. Look, mami: Here is my son. They say he looks like you.

"Everybody around here will know someone on that flight," said Dave Hunt in Coogan's. On his crowded walls there were pictures of Jack Kennedy and Paul O'Dwyer and a Cuban priest named Felix Varela. The Spanish-speaking priest came to New York in 1830 and helped build Transfiguration Church on Mott St. for the wretched Irish poor of the Five Points. He wasn't Dominican, but he was close. "It just breaks your heart," Hunt said. "I mean, they're our people, too."