ON WALL STREET/Conor o' Cleary: Many residents of lower Manhattan who witnessed terrible things on September 11th worried that when the twin pillars of light were beamed into the sky from beside ground zero to mark the passing of six months by recreating the collapsed towers of the World Trade Centre, it would be a disconcerting experience.
It hasn't turned out like that. When the lights were switched on by the 12-year-old daughter of a victim as darkness fell on Monday, they were surprisingly translucent, not a solid wall of blinding electricity as many expected. We didn't relive the awful moments when we saw people falling from 100 stories after all.
The 88 shafts of blue light from two square banks of 7,000-watt search-lights - some borrowed from Las Vegas - started their journey skywards like transparent needles, widening to form more tangible columns high above Manhattan.
Up close one could see through the ghostly beams where the rescue workers were still labouring six months after the event in what is now called the bath-tub, the vast square pit in which the towers once stood and which has for months been bathed every night in the glare of stadium lights.
Though it is still a tomb where bodies are being found, almost all the twisted steel and debris has been removed and the recovery work has proceeded at such a pace that it will be fully cleared in a matter of weeks, well ahead of schedule.
This has helped New York to recover psychologically from the trauma of September 11th, and the erection of the beams of light has subtly changed a ghoulish attraction which has been drawing hundreds of tourists and celebrities every day into something more uplifting.
This is important in a city which, like a grieving relative, is finding that six months on, the despair and helplessness can be just as bad or worse than in the immediate aftermath. The erection of the tribute of light coincides too with the quickening return of normality to the shattered down-town financial district.
A landmark was reached last week when the popular Century 21 cut-price designer store overlooking ground zero opened its doors again, with customers and staff applauding each other as the shoppers surged in. The asbestos-contaminated cinema on Vesey Street will start showing movies again next month, and West Side highway, the main traffic artery along the Hudson onto which the towers collapsed, is to reopen in a few weeks.
The air quality has improved and pedestrians no longer wear hygiene masks. Many of the small stores run by immigrants around the site have reopened. Merrill Lynch has resumed full operations in the World Financial Centre and the big law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton has brought back its 1,100 employees to No 1 Liberty Plaza, which at one time seemed destined for destruction. All talk of moving the New York Stock Exchange away from Wall Street has evaporated as confidence returned.
The recovery of the Dow Jones Industrial Index to pre-September 11th levels and more as investors left recession fears behind has helped dispel the atmosphere of crisis. However, it is impossible not to notice the shops and cafes here and there which have remained boarded up, and there are still street barricades around ground zero and shrines with distressing pictures of hundreds of the 2,830 people who died.
Thousands of employees and residents lost friends and colleagues and find it too painful to work in lower Manhattan, where September 11th invades one's consciousness every day, several times a day.
Here probably more than anywhere else people refused to watch the six-month-on television documentaries at the weekend showing over and over the towers collapsing, aware that emotions held in check could break down. It has probably been toughest on the survivors of the firms hardest hit by the attacks: Cantor Fitzgerald which lost 658 of its World Trade Centre employees; Keefe, Bruyette & Woods where 67 stock traders and analysts perished; Sandler O'Neill & Partners where 66 employees were killed; and Fred Alger Management which lost 35 staff. All four financial companies have stayed in business, and Cantor has re-established itself as the dominant player in bond brokerage on Wall Street. But these companies have set up shop elsewhere and are unlikely to return to the financial district.
Restoring the infrastructure in itself will not bring back the companies and workers who have relocated uptown or out of New York. Just 20,000 of the 138,000 employees displaced by the attacks have returned, according to a survey by Tenant-Wise.com, an online estate agent.
Firms based in lower Manhattan have moved three in 10 of their workers outside the city. Lehman Brothers, for example, has moved more than 4,000 of its 6,400 employees to mid-town, despite having its damaged World Financial Centre offices restored.
The US federal authorities see some merit in dispersing financial institutions away from one location. This redeployment in the financial world, combined with expanded off-site back-up systems, means that if another attack comes, there is much less danger that the engine of the world's biggest economy will be as badly damaged as when the planes hit the towers six months ago.
