The World Trade Centre was more than just two towers - it was where we shopped, took coffee and browsed in book stores. It was our neighbourhood. Two years have passed and we still think in terms of 'before ' and 'after'. Conor O'Clery, North America Editor, writes about life in Manhattan since the day the skies darkened over New York
There was a chocolatier, a hot-bread shop, a kitchenware store, a J Crew clothing shop and a Banana Republic. There were magazine kiosks, a cobbler's, a hair salon with a Russian stylist called Irina, and dozens of other little outlets whose names I cannot recall. There was a big coffee bar near the subway entrance that was great for quick business meetings. There was the best bookshop in Manhattan with deep armchairs, a police station and a cavernous delicatessen full of exotic foods. There was a cosmetics store where I bought a wooden-handled London Fog umbrella the day I opened a (short-lived) money-market account in the walk-in Charles Schwab office.
They were all destroyed when the towers came down.
Most people think of the World Trade Centre as two soaring towers that contained the offices of bankers, traders, shippers, commodity brokers, insurance agents and lawyers. But it had a broad shopping and service concourse underneath and this was our village, a high street for those who worked there and who lived in the shadow of the towers.
Two years have passed and we still think in terms of "before" and "after". Rarely a day goes by without recalling the awfulness of that morning. We occasionally look up and remember the bodies falling. In the struggle to comprehend what was happening, as the 110-storey towers collapsed, I remember thinking there would be terrible retribution.
Sympathy poured in from all over the world for the wound inflicted on the people and fabric of a great city in the most devastating attack on the modern US. "We are all Americans" proclaimed Le Monde.
As the US unleashed its wars of retaliation, and the global mood darkened, we took stock of how our lives had changed.
We are constantly aware of the fact that this is where 2,792 people were killed. It is personal. We all knew someone who perished.
The physical changes endured by the residents of downtown Manhattan are small and inconsequential compared with the suffering of the relatives, and to the carnage caused by two years of terrible retribution and further acts of terror. They are little more than inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.
But we feel them and the loss of the "village" is bound up with the suppressed emotions of that day.
We shopped in the World Trade Centre concourse. We went to the south tower to queue for discount Broadway theatre tickets, to the north tower to pick up airline tickets, and to the Winter Gardens to get films developed. We went to the Arthur J Tobin Plaza at the foot of the towers for free performances of jazz, country, rhythm and blues and classical music.
We used the wide underground mall on rainy days to walk from Battery Park City to Church Street Post Office at the north-east corner, or to Century 21, the cheap clothing store across Broadway where you could pick up designer clothes for next to nothing.
It was also convenient for avoiding the hot sun in summer or the freezing winds that blew off the choppy Hudson waters in winter.
We would enter the river-side Winter Gardens in the World Financial Centre, pass tall palm trees, climb the wide marble staircase where wedding couples from Chinatown came to pose for album pictures, and cross over to the World Trade Centre along a glass-enclosed walkway that straddled West Street.
The walkway was so wide it staged the New York orchid show every year.
On the other side, we rode elevators down into the heart of the concourse.
At rush hour on week days it teemed with office workers, but at weekends the complex belonged to the Battery Park City residents. On Saturday mornings we particularly liked to browse in Borders, the enormous bookstore, or sample ruglash with coffee in the Amish Market, the magical deli with hanging hams and health-food buffet staffed by Turkish immigrants. All this was smashed, along with the tiny Greek Orthodox Church in a car-park that had defied the developers.
It took a year for the Winter Gardens to be reconstructed. It was a deeply unsettling experience to enter the renovated steel and glass atrium with its new palm trees when it reopened, like stepping into the pre-9/11 past. The sweeping staircase is there as before, but now it leads not to the grand walkway - it too was destroyed - but to a roped-off viewing window overlooking the massive pit that is a metaphor for the hole in our lives.
Every time I go there I see the walkway in my mind, full of people hurrying to and fro, many of whom would have died on 9/11, their pulverised remains forming particles in the dust clouds.
The companies that occupied the twin towers and provided work for 40,000 people have relocated permanently elsewhere. Just one tenant of the World Trade Centre office complex has returned, a law firm called Thacher, Proffitt & Wood, that used to occupy three floors of the south tower and moved back to an adjacent building just two weeks ago.
Some commercial life has revived. The Joon New York pen shop, Watch Station, Barclay-Rex tobacconists and Sunglass Hut have re-opened around the Winter Gardens. So too have Starbucks and a couple of fancy restaurants. Johnny's Fish Grill is back in business, though it no longer produces the late afternoon roar of conversation from brokers and traders who used to crowd in after the markets closed. The Gee Whiz Diner in Greenwich Street, where customers are greeted by name, was swallowed by the great dust avalanche of the south tower collapse and closed for many months - but it too is back in business. On the other side of Ground Zero, the badly damaged post office remains boarded up. A smaller version of Borders bookstore has re-opened a few blocks south along Broadway.
Nearly 300 books on 9/11 were published but few of them are on display. Almost all were commercially unsuccessful. There is only so much that people can take of stories of tragedy that rip at the emotions.
The mood of the neighbourhood has gone up and down in the last two years. Terror and despair gave way to defiance and sombre acceptance. There have been moments of gut-wrenching emotion, as when bodies were found and brought out, sometimes at dead of night, past lines of saluting, teary-eyed rescue workers. There have been times of exaltation, as when the beams of light shone up into the clouds from an adjacent lot to mark the first anniversary. This year they will rise from the footprints of the towers themselves.
There have been "thank goodness" moments, such as when the block on our side of West Street containing the Embassy Suites Hotel, a 16-screen cinema and Lily's noodle restaurant reopened after a year's decontamination and refurnishing. How we had missed Lily's scallion pancakes.
There have been times when resentment predominated - like just this week when we learned that we had been lied to by the government about the danger from air pollution.
The attacks left huge piles of rubble smouldering well into last year.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said that the air was safe to breath. It turns out that we were systematically misled, apparently to keep Wall Street open. Just this week the EPA inspector general reported that the agency's former administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, had given unfounded assurances about indoor pollution and toxic dust. She had come under pressure from the White House, allowing her statements to be screened by the Council on Environmental Quality, which is chaired by James Connaughton, a lawyer who formerly represented the asbestos industry. The first 34 floors of the Twin Towers contained asbestos sprayed onto beams, floors and ceilings as fire retardant.
"We didn't want to scare people," Whitman said. Her reasoning was that spikes in asbestos readings tended to revert quickly to acceptable levels. Senator Hillary Clinton is calling for an investigation.
The real danger it appears came not from the smoke but the toxic dust that settled on carpets and lingered in air ducts. Our building was only lightly contaminated. The management had the good sense to change the air ducts and the air conditioning units in every apartment.
Some of the victims' families are also outraged that developers want to build new towers in the sacred ground of the "bathtub" where most of the human remains were found. The Coalition of 9/11 Families organised a rally last Wednesday to protest about the plan to build new commercial buildings and a bus depot on the site where only a portion has been set aside for a memorial. A small group turned up and found the gates locked.
The pit is a construction area today. It will be for many years. There's little to see but a deep square hole in the ground, across which runs an underground railway protected by grey metal girders, like part of a Meccano set.
But even after two years its role as a place of pilgrimage for camera-wielding Americans has not diminished. This is where it all started. They are drawn by a mixture of patriotism, curiosity and reverence. They talk in subdued tones. The weekends around Ground Zero now belong not to the residents, but to them.