Less than 24 hours after a crude car bomb in a smoking Nissan Pathfinder transformed Times Square into a major crime scene, the popular tourist district slowly returned to its traditional role Sunday as businesses reopened and officials worked to reassure tourists and residents that the area was safe. 'It's a normal, beautiful sunny afternoon; people are hanging out at the tables and chairs; for better or worse we've all gotten used to some of this kind of craziness,' Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance, told New York One. 'We have no indication that any Broadway show is canceled tonight or today, so anybody that was planning to come to Broadway should totally continue with that.' Federal authorities echoed that sentiment, saying that they were confident that the threat to tourists in New York's Theater district had been contained. 'Times Square I think is now safe,' said U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security Janet Napolitano told ABC News 'This Week.' Times Square had been seized with anxiety after a T-shirt vendor, Lance Orton, saw smoke billowing out of a Nissan sport-utility vehicle and alerted a NYPD officer Saturday. Orton, the T-shirt vendor who first spotted the smoke, emerged as a reluctant hero this weekend. Clearly irritated by the crush of reporters who pleaded with him for a quote, Orton said he needed 'to get some sleep.' Asked if he was happy to have played a role in alerting the police to the terror act, he said 'of course, man, I'm a veteran. What do you think?' Orton offered this advice to New Yorkers: 'You see something, you say something.' Officer Wayne Rhatigan responded to Orton's concern. 'I did a lap around the vehicle. The inside was smoking,' Rhatigan told the Daily News. 'I smelled gunpowder and knew it might blow any second.' Rhatigan called for backup as he and two rookie cops directed hundreds of people away from the smoking vehicle which had been parked outside the Minskoff Theater, home of the Disney play, 'The Lion King,' according to the New York paper. When Corrie van Buuren, a 56-year-old professor, left an Italian restaurant in Times Square on Saturday evening, she and her fellow diners walked into a scene of flashing police lights and metal barricades. 'We came out and everything was surrounded by police,' said van Buuren, who was visiting New York for the first time with fellow educators from Amsterdam. 'Nobody was panicking.' After observing the chaotic but controlled scene for about 30 minutes, van Buuren and her friends said they decided to head back to the hoteland were inconvenienced only by a few extra blocks of walking to get around the street closures. When asked if she would return to New York for another visit, van Buuren replied, 'Why not?' adding that she had been in Paris and Madrid during terrorist alerts. 'We felt very safe because everything was under control, with the police and firemen and ambulances.' Heraldo Munoz, a Chilean diplomat who headed a U.N. counterterrorism committee in 2003 and 2004 dealing with threats from the Taliban and al-Qaida, was eating dinner at a Chilean restaurant, Pomaire, about two blocks away from the site where the SUV was found. 'This is really a surprise. We have come to think New York, since the towers fell, has become a safer city,' Munoz said. 'I don't think you can make any conclusions at this point. There are so many crazies in the world. But this may suggest that the terrorist threat continues to be alive and it's never going away.' But the threat did not appear to deter tourists, families and even protesters who returned to Times Square, taking in the warm, sunny Sunday. Brandy Gagnou and Cara Gavagni made use of the remaining hours before their flight home to Cocoa Beach, Fla. They had looked forward to capping their weekend trip with office mates by seeing 'The Lion King' on Saturday, but their show was canceled. 'It was very intimidating last night,' said Gagnou, 28. 'I'm grateful they (police) were able to protect us, but now we have to go back ... I would love to come back.' Stacey Huckstapp from Britain was visiting her younger brother who had moved to the United States in November. She said she had been eager to visit her only sibling. But the 29-year-old said a number of events had curtailed her previous trips {ndash} first a strike by British Airways, then a snowstorm, followed by the volcanic ash that grounded European flights last month. 'I've finally got out here and now there's a bomb scare,' she said, before boarding a bus from Times Square to see her brother. 'All I've been wanting to do is give my brother a hug.' New York authorities were already ramping up security for the arrival of more than 180 foreign officials, including Iranian President Mahmoud Amhadinejad, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton, for a major conference on nuclear weapons scheduled to start Monday at the United Nations. Senior U.N. diplomats said they expected the U.N. would have to increase their security preparedness. 'This is going to make it a circus,' said one senior diplomat. But U.N. officials said that there had been no indication by midday Sunday from U.N. security officials that the threat level would be raised for the U.N. conference. On Seventh Avenue, organizers were busy setting up for a planned peace rally in advance of the conference Sunday. The only sign of the massive evacuation from the previous evening were the metal barricades -- used to cordon off a 10-block area -- now pushed off to the side and stacked about a foot deep on the sidewalks. Joseph Gerson, an organizer of an anti-nuclear weapons rally that was to take place near Times Square, said he never doubted the event would happen as planned. 'It was not a big bomb. It was basically designed to reinforce fear,' said Gerson, of Boston. In light of the bomb scare, Gerson said, a benefit of the rally 'is to say, `Look, life goes on and we need to live without fear'.' ( 