A HOLE IN THE CITY.(World Trade Center site)

Bordered on the north by Vesey Street, on the south by Liberty, on the east by Church, and on the west by West Street, the World Trade Center site comprises sixteen acres. Without the towers, it seems improbably small, as does the rest of lower Manhattan--shrunken somehow by disaster. The other day, two Spanish tourists who had come to see the site were questioning a police officer on duty nearby. They wanted to know where the second tower had been, and he tried to explain to them that it had been right there, right next to the first. "Dos edificios--no mas," he said, gesturing at the empty space across the street.

Much of the area immediately surrounding the World Trade Center site has been reopened only in the past few months. "Please pardon our appearance during renovations," requests a placard posted in front of the Brooks Brothers that served as a morgue in the days after the attack. Some businesses have come back to the area--Starbucks, Century 21--but many have not. The words "NYPD Temp HQ--Med Trauma" are spray-painted in black and red on the windows of a defunct Burger King at the corner of Church and Liberty. On another empty storefront, "God Bless" has been scratched in the brownish-gray dust that still clings to most buildings in the area. Ten House, a fire station at the corner of Liberty and Greenwich Streets, was home to two companies, Engine 10 and Ladder 10. It lost four men, and is now being used as a command center for the recovery operations. "You must have an OSHA card for a respirator," a sign on the door reads. "No card, no resp. Got it?"

It was expected that the recovery and cleanup effort would take as long as a year. Instead, the job will be done in less than nine months. Some eight hundred people a day have been working in around-the-clock shifts, carting away more than a million and a half tons of concrete and steel. The statistics, grisly as they are, only hint at the magnitude of the horror. Workers have so far found ...