Before being evacuated on September 11th, the residents of Battery Park City were typical New Yorkers. They kept to themselves, many often not returning greetings in the lifts or lobbies.
Now they are coming back to a community bonded together by a terrible shared experience. They hug the doorman they have not seen for 10 days. They shake hands with neighbours they never knew by name, and ask about others who have not yet returned. They discuss with strangers whether they will stay or find a new home elsewhere.
Residents tell each other about messages on the Battery Park City website, where people try to find each other. "Tony, no one is able to locate you, your brother has been frantically looking for you," reads one. "Susan and Howard, are you OK?" asks another.
We find out that a Scandinavian woman is missing from our building at 41 River Terrace, and that the Korean dry-cleaners on Worth Street have uncollected laundry from another neighbour since September 10th.
In Gateway Plaza, the flats nearest the epicentre, people are returning to find sofas coated with debris and doors kicked in by firemen looking for injured people. Some have found watches and cameras missing.
But for most of the 9,500 residents in the 23 apartment buildings of Battery Park City, a 30-acre strip of river walks and parks created from the landfill from the World Trade centre, the only material loss is spoiled food and lifeless house plants.
The Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, let us back this weekend after the buildings were declared safe and services restored. The esplanade and streets are hosed down constantly and even the plants washed free of soot and dust.
But we find ourselves inside the perimeter of "Ground Zero" and have to pass though a National Guard checkpoint - where a sign says "Ground Hero" - and show proof of residence. The soldiers standing around a squat humvee welcome us back but we are told not to take pictures on the street.
We have to walk through "Rent-a-Fence" alleyways on the pavements and we are sometimes unable to move for a while because of unexplained "federal shutdowns".
The once-tranquil street outside our lobby is clogged with police and rescue vehicles, rows of portacabins and "CAT Rental Power" diesel generators, as big as container trucks, that roar all night as they pump electric current into our buildings. The noise is ceaseless. Police helicopters land and take off in the park beside us and a crane on a massive floating dock squeals and bangs as it lifts twisted metal girders from flatbed trucks on to giant barges. A dredger nearby hauls up black sludge to deepen the channel for even bigger barges.
This is going to be a long operation but it is proceeding at a furious pace: already 100,000 tons of metal and concrete have been taken away.
Further along the esplanade, hosepipes snake across the "dog-free" lawn from a fire tug called the John D McKean. The slides and swings, the basketball court and the rollerblade paths are deserted, like artefacts of a happier era. The shops, restaurants, hotel and multi-screen cinema in the block which was the liveliest centre of our neighbourhood are shuttered and out of bounds, and in the car-park beyond a row of 24 burned-out cars testifies to the collateral damage as the towers cascaded down on to the surrounding areas.
The work at Ground Zero never stops. At night from our window it is like a scene from Dante's Inferno. Dazzlingly bright searchlights cut through clouds of white smoke, illuminating a mountain of rubble from which protrude the jagged metal skeletons of the World Trade Centre.
Cranes 50 stories high tower over the tiny figures of emotionally-drained rescue workers in gas masks, and sparks shower down where ironworkers cut through metal with acetylene torches. The smoke sometimes drifts in our direction, bringing an acrid smell.
An engineer from the department of environmental protection brought a noisy machine to test the air in all our apartments in turn. So far no dangerous levels of asbestos or lead have been detected, even at the centre of Ground Zero.
The smoke, however, worries those residents who have children, and our third-floor friends, Barry and Sharon Dillon, who have a new-born baby and a three-year-old decided to stay away for now in an uptown apartment they had rented for a month.
Other acquaintances are concerned that what was a popular and vibrant 24-hour community, created in the mid-1990s from converted office blocks and new buildings, is going to be the site of the world's largest construction project for months, if not years.
But it is the awfullness of what has happened that may make some residents leave for good. "We will feel upset every time we wake up in the morning," said a 42nd-floor neighbour. "The television sits in front of the window. How can we watch Frasier in the evening with the tomb of 6,000 people lit up behind it?"
For now he is keeping the blinds down permanently. There are other problems. We have to collect our post from the main post office far uptown, and our cars are stranded in an underground car park under layers of grey dust.
But these inconveniences will pass. Miracles have already been worked in repairing shattered servives. Electric light, hot water and telephones have been restored (and our house plants revived after watering) and there is a sense of shared communal defiance among people who now know their neighbours.
The monthly Battery Park City Broadsheet, which during the summer told us when the QE2 would come by, has reappeared with this message: "The shattering events of September 11th almost wrecked our world -- but our spirit is intact, our determination stronger than ever.
" Despite unforgettable and horrifying memories, we will go on."