What happened on September 11th in New York affected all who live there and sent the city into a state of shock from which it is only slowly recovering. The effect could be measured in the heightened level of fear, as people realised how terribly vulnerable they were.
It could be sensed in the strained faces of commuters in the subways that said "What next?" It could be gauged in the sense of depression which has yet to lift from a city where bodies are still being recovered from the debris of the World Trade Centre and remembrance services continue in the suburbs while relatives weep.
It could be witnessed in the churches, where congregations swelled to hear words of comfort from overworked pastors. It could be felt in many other ways, like the obsession, even three months later, with the details of that terrible day and the retelling to strangers in diners and friends at dinner parties of where people were and what they were doing when they heard the news.
It's as if life before September 11th belonged to another time, to a more carefree world of long summer days when people felt secure and inviolate, and when their preoccupations were those of peacetime. The big story on the cable news channels, CNN, Fox, MSNBC and CNBC, as it had been for weeks, was the disappearance of Congressman Gary Condit's intern, Chandra Levy.
Dan Rather of CBS recalled that on September 10th he discussed with his editors the dearth of real news. The New York tabloids were full of lurid accounts of a society PR woman backing her car into patrons at a Hamptons nightclub. The sports pages were taken up with the return of Michael Jordan to basketball and Venus Williams's success in the US Open tennis.
There was a story about under-age drinking charges being erased against first daughter Barbara Bush.
It was Fashion Week in New York. In local politics, a poll showed Mark Green favourite to win the Democratic nomination to succeed Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had been crucified by the tabloids over efforts to bring his female companion to the official residence where his estranged wife still lived. The New York Times had a story that day rating billionaire Michael Bloomberg's chance of becoming mayor as "far slimmer" than even getting the Republican nomination.
Mr Giuliani spent that last Monday of peace dedicating a new firehouse in the Bronx. The firemen's chaplain Father Mychal Judge, was there. He said a Mass and told the firemen: "You have to live each day and appreciate each day. You never know what will happen to you."
The news from Washington was that the IMF and World Bank planned to shorten their annual meeting to thwart anti-globalisation protesters. An ABC poll showed that George W. Bush's popularity was waning, with 57 per cent of people saying they disapproved of his tax cuts.
I wrote a story that day on how the US President hoped to lift the flagging economy with tax rebates, noting the precipitous slide on Wall Street the previous week and the shock news that unemployment had risen from 4.5 per cent to 4.9 per cent in August.
The signs of recession were mounting. Michelin cut 2,000 jobs on September 10th, Gateway 1,050 and Qwest Communications 4,000 as tech sales dwindled. The newspapers also carried - on inside pages - an intriguing snippet from Afghanistan about the killing by suicide bombers of the leading anti-Taliban fighter, Ahmed Shah Massoud.
Then came September 11th. More than 3,000 people died in the space of 100 minutes that beautiful morning, among them Father Mychal Judge and 343 firemen. Within 24 hours Mayor Giuliani had assumed the mantle of hero.
"Rudy" was everywhere, urging calm, persuading people to try to continue with their lives. Gary Condit disappeared from the TV screens (to this day Ms Levy has not been found). Broadway closed for the first time in half a century.
Wall Street couldn't function for four days. When it reopened on the following Monday the Dow plunged 13 per cent, and suffered its worst week since 1933.
Airline stocks plummeted as people abandoned travel by plane.
The IMF called off its meeting and the anti-globalisation movement abandoned its protests. Downtown Manhattan took stock of the material devastation. A total of 14,632 businesses were destroyed, damaged or badly disrupted by the catastrophe.
Tens of thousands of people who worked for the 616 companies that had occupied the World Trade Centre or firms in other wrecked buildings were either dead or dispersed. The area of Class A office space wrecked amounted to 13 million square feet - about the entire office space inventory of Atlanta or Miami. Some big finance houses, like Lehman Brothers, moved uptown.
So many banking and brokerage firms relocated across the Hudson that the newspapers began to refer to Jersey City as Wall Street West. Even if they could, many employees did not want to return to lower Manhattan.
Philip Marber, head of equities operations at Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 677 out of 1,000 employees, said simply: "We're not going back there." Governor George Pataki and Mayor Giuliani proposed a city-state authority to oversee rebuilding the 16-acre site of the World Trade Centre and to devise strategies to coax businesses and residents back and construct a suitable memorial.
But another tower became a casualty of the attack: a planned $1.1 billion 50-storey glass edifice which was mooted last year as a new trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange.
Richard Grasso, chairman of the NYSE, said that having a 900-ft skyscraper as the symbolic centre of American commerce was not "saleable". No one would want to work there, waiting for the next attack.
City Comptroller Alan Hevesi calculated that the Big Apple lost $45 billion in infrastructure, buildings, equipment and human lives. Some 80,000 people lost their jobs by the end of the year.
The sudden fall in visitors after September 11th devastated New York's $25 billion a year tourism industry. Seventy restaurants closed and 15,000 catering workers lost their jobs. Of the 180,000 people employed in the securities industry that provided the city with 19 per cent of its salary base, 15,000 had been laid off by December, though that process had been well under way since the Nasdaq bubble burst.
Before September 11th, New York was already "going into a slide and maybe a recession - this makes it much worse," said Mr Hevesi. The city is $33 million in debt due to earlier borrowing, and it now finds itself staring at a projected budget deficit of $4 billion. Mayor Giuliani froze hiring and ordered a 15 per cent cut in spending by city agencies in such areas as garbage removal and help for the homeless.
Michael Bloomberg won the Republican nomination and outspent and defeated Mark Green to succeed Rudy, and vowed to continue more aggressively with spending cuts.
New Yorkers now fear a return to dirtier streets, greater crime, disintegrating schools and a drift of people to the suburbs in New Jersey and Connecticut.
The message from President Bush, no friend of New York, in the days after the attack was: "Anything it takes to help New York." "How about $20 billion?" suggested city leaders. "You've got it," the President said.
But by year's end they had got just over half that and Washington had become less sympathetic to the city's plight as other priorities arose in what the news channels called "America's New War".
Nevertheless, President Bush's rating, even in this most liberal of cities, soared and stayed high as war was launched against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Grief gave way to anger and intense patriotism after September 11th and opinion hardened behind the war. The Christmas decorations this year were put up in red, white and blue. Dissent over military action taken found little sympathy among post-September 11th New Yorkers, especially Irish Americans, the community that lost so many police and firemen and financial workers.
New York will have to suffer more pain before the effect of September 11th wears off. The city stands to lose $90 billion in output in the next three years, according to Economy.com, which said New York's economy would contract by 9 per cent in the second half of 2001.
With the US now in recession, it could be three years before the city returns to pre-September 11th levels.
But the process of healing is already under way. Gradually, in the aftermath of the attack, and despite the anthrax scares, the city resumed its normal rhythms.
Broadway made a comeback and by mid-October attendance at shows was higher than before September 11th. Hotel occupancy inched up again. Visitors started to come back, including a succession of world leaders and dignitaries, many from Ireland, making a pilgrimage to Ground Zero. They had another purpose, to give new meaning to the popular slogan "I love New York".
New York has a unique culture of excellence in many fields, like finance, media, publishing, advertising, theatre, the arts, consulting, accounting, health care and technology. It draws the best talents from across the globe to seek the richest rewards. It is the city of opportunity for emigrants from all over the world, and those who love it want to keep it that way.