We met on a basketball court in the warm afternoon sunshine at the corner of Canal Street and Sixth Avenue - a few hundred of the 11,000 Battery Park City and financial district residents still unable to return to our apartments near the devastated World Trade Centre.
It was an unusual group of displaced persons, at least by the standards of refugees we see on television screens from other parts of the world.
Most of us have credit cards and companies to cushion the financial strain of finding temporary accommodation. But the personal pain was sharply etched on the faces of many financial district employees and their spouses and children sitting cross-legged on the tarmac as they patiently questioned local politicians.
People from all 23 still-closed apartment buildings in Battery Park City embraced and cried as they met for the first time since witnessing the horror from their windows in what is now called "Ground Zero minus one".
We wondered about the fate of neighbours we had not heard from. Local politicians and community leaders made compassionate, stirring speeches but it all boiled down to one message: "We don't know when you can go back."
There were boos when Bob Townley, director of Manhattan Youth, excoriated the owner of Gateway Apartments who left a recorded telephone message, "pay your rent", for his evacuated tenants.
They joined the cheers and applause for trucks passing by with rescue workers and the bones of the two skyscrapers from the smoking ruins down Hudson Street.
Here, between arty Greenwich Village which rarely shows its feelings and the war zone to the south, people have festooned railings with yellow ribbons, made grottoes of candles and photographs, erected American flags, and plastered walls and shop windows with messages expressing the complex of emotions stirred up by the air attack on their city. These varied from "Get the bastards" to "Please don't use this as an excuse to hate."
At the Trattoria Cafe Bar which employed 80 workers who perished in the Windows on the World restaurant, one message was written larger than the thousands of others: "Enough is enough. They asked for it, now give them what they asked for."
Afterwards we drifted to Pier 40, where hundreds of displaced residents gather daily now to plead with police to allow them downtown, even if only to get some belongings.
About 200 were driven the short distance under military escort and told they had 10 minutes to get in and out, but we left because the operation was suspended when some spent too long in their apartments and the soldiers got angry.
One could not blame those who lingered. One man came on behalf of his missing sister to collect clothing and hairbrushes to help identify her.
Those who got in reported all the buildings were intact apart from some broken windows and grime. One resident, psychoanalyst Alexander Stein, found his flat ransacked and two Italian racing bicycles looted.
Uptown, on 51st street near the hotel where we have relocated, a large crowd gathered silently with candles outside a small fire station to which eight firemen did not return on Tuesday last.
It was a moving and salutary reminder of those thousands who will never return home.