Strolling around my downtown Manhattan district on Sunday afternoon I came across several armour-clad aliens from the new George Lucas film, Star Wars: Episode II.
That was remarkable enough but what was more interesting for me was that the space-suited actors were ushering celebrity guests into the lobby of the Embassy Suites Hotel where a movie-premiere reception was being held.
The Embassy Suites has been closed since September 11th because of contamination from asbestos-laden dust which billowed through the windows and doors when the twin towers across the highway collapsed.
The reopening of the building, which also contains a 15-screen cinema and several ground-floor restaurants including Lily's, the best Chinese noodle shop around, marks a turning point in the revitalisation of our devastated neighbourhood.
For months we have lived with the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre in the form of blocked-off streets and closed buildings, dirt and noise from the excavation, and always the awareness of the mass grave nearby where almost 3,000 people perished. Now the last of the human remains have been taken away and the remaining rubble should be cleared from the floor of the vast pit in a matter of days. West Side highway and the tunnel to Brooklyn have been reopened, the temporary power cables encased in planking that clogged our footpaths have disappeared, and the removal vans in the streets are bringing new residents now rather than moving people out.
The last giant barge will soon chug away from the temporary dock behind our apartment where the boom and crash of debris being unloaded has gone on around the clock for eight months.
The coming of spring has helped lighten the mood. Tulips, azaleas and catmint are in full bloom in the riverside-park, bird-watching tours by the Battery Park conservancy have restarted, and roller-bladers have returned to whizz around the North Cove.
The Star Wars: Episode II premiere was part of a Tribeca Film Festival organised by actor Robert De Niro, and his producing partner, Jane Rosenthal, who live a few blocks from "ground zero", and director Martin Scorsese, specifically to help revive the downtown scene.
"After September 11th our neighbourhood was so hard hit and so devastated not only physically but economically, that we felt we should try to do something," said Ms Rosenthal.
The festival started on May 8th with a party attended by celebrities including Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Kevin Spacey, Regis Philbin, Hugh Grant and Hilary Swank. It evolved at the weekend into a people's festival stretching along Greenwich Street - familiar to millions of TV viewers who saw frightened people flee the choking dust cloud from the falling towers - with live music, dance, puppet shows and street theatre featuring clowns, stilt walkers and jugglers.
If anything the festival served to emphasise something which has become clear since September 11th, that the future of downtown Manhattan does not depend on restoring its prestige as a world financial centre.
Thirty years ago less than 1,000 people lived here, now the resident population is more than 20,000. The catastrophe actually may accelerate the transformation of the area which encompasses Wall Street, Battery Park City and Tribeca into a vibrant community, an evolution that had been somewhat hampered before now by the presence of the massive twin towers.
New York mourned the demise of the towers, and for a time there was a defiant move to have them replaced, but now people are saying the unthinkable, that the huge structures which disrupted the street grid were actually an impediment to the natural evolution of lower Manhattan. "It may be blasphemous to say it, but the World Trade Centre was an anachronism both in scale and the architecture it represented," said Meyer Frucher, former president of the Battery Park City Authority.
A consensus on the future of downtown Manhattan has emerged among elected and city officials, according to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Their vision is of a neighbourhood with a balance of office buildings, apartments, converted lofts, and shops and restaurants. One thing is sure, the towers will not rise again.
While the Tribeca Film Festival, which will become an annual event, brought an atmosphere of celebration and gaiety to the streets around Ground Zero, it was impossible to forget about September 11th for long.
One of the movies shown at the Tribeca Grand was a documentary called Telling Nicholas, the story of a father who waited 10 days after the attack before telling his seven-year-old son, Nicholas, that his mother was dead. It was inspired by a flier of a missing Staten Island woman, one of the hundreds of posters put up by despairing relatives - which, faded and frayed, are still left pinned up on shrines around Ground Zero.
Lest we forget.
