Remembrance Day in New York

By JOHN LEE

Central Park, the Empire State Building and some of the finest museums in the world will always be drawcards for visitors to New York, but thousands are now turning up every day to an area that will never be just another tourist attraction.

Overwhelmed by the number of people flocking to Ground Zero - the World Trade Centre site in lower Manhattan that was devastated by the September 11 terrorist attacks - the city has built a ticketed viewing platform and sanctioned an official guided walking tour.

Tourists can also visit a chapel that has become a centre for worldwide tributes, a preserved, dust-encrusted section of a store, and a giant statue retrieved from the wreckage and transformed into a temporary memorial.

But the focus of the Historical Lower Manhattan Walking Tour - and the reason most people take it - is Ground Zero. Established six months ago and led by licensed New York sightseeing guides, the three-hour walk reveals how the area's people, buildings and businesses were affected by the attack.

For US$15 ($32) groups of around 20 people begin from near Times Square, and travel by subway to the area around the disaster site. After some general comments on lower Manhattan's history, the Ground Zero portion of the tour, available only at weekends, begins.

The tours do not have greater access to the site than other visitors, so many guides lead their groups to the nearby Stage Door Deli for a view over the recovery site from the second floor.

The deli, a bustling bagel-and-everything-else eatery staffed by stereotypically abrasive New Yorkers, was closed for six months after September 11. Now, while the downstairs is busy, the upstairs is often empty. As many businesses in the area rely on office workers, they are still struggling to recover. Some will never re-open.

From the vantage point of the deli, there is little left to see at Ground Zero, where the clean-up was officially concluded with a ceremony on May 30. But what impresses is the scale of the site: a 21m-deep crater stretching over 6.47ha where seven tower blocks and a church once stood. Only the damaged buildings that surround the crater - most notably the Deutsche Bank block, still shrouded in black netting - show the scars of what happened here. A giant banner on one tower carries the words "We will not forget".

In contrast to the almost inconceivably large crater, the next stop on the tour is the nearby St Paul's Chapel. Perched close to the edge of the site, the small Georgian church - along with its Waterford crystal chandeliers - miraculously survived September 11 and became the moral centre of many people's visits to Ground Zero.

One of those low-rise churches overshadowed by towering office blocks, the chapel was built in 1766. Modelled on London's St Martin-in-the-Fields, it is New York's only remaining pre-revolutionary building.

Formerly used as a rest centre for relief workers, St Paul's is being restored and re-opened to the public later this year. But visitors have already claimed the iron railings surrounding the chapel and its graveyard for a giant collage of tributes from around the world.

The railings are almost hidden by weather-beaten notes, photographs, flags, scarves, T-shirts and baseball caps from dozens of countries, including Canada, Korea, Brazil, China and the Netherlands. Messages of solidarity are scrawled on Manchester United soccer jerseys from England and chains of rain-resistant origami from schools in Japan.

The tour guides allow visitors to spend some time here reading the messages. But since the chapel is near the entrance to the hugely popular viewing platform, this area is regularly overcrowded. Police are often on hand to ensure visitors remain orderly.

While the remainder of the walking tour continues along the perimeter of Ground Zero towards Wall St, many on the tour eventually return to the chapel or join the line for their timed access to the viewing platform.

Opened 110 days after the attack, the 5m-high wood and steel platform was a controversial addition to Ground Zero. Detractors see it as the first step in ensuring the site becomes a tourist attraction, but the platform's builders - a group of architects, city agencies and private contractors - claim the structure helps to regulate visitors, 300,000 of whom used it in its first two months.

A free, timed ticket system gives visitors 30 minutes on the platform to look over the site. Police check tickets at the entrance and try to ensure that no one stays beyond their allotted time. But despite its popularity, the view from the platform is similar to that from the Stage Door Deli - there is little to see beyond discreet rebuilding work, such as the laying of replacement subway lines.

While the recovery effort has focused on removing most signs of the September 11 attack, two nearby sites take a different approach.

David Cohen has spent US$10,000 ($21,410) encasing a 2.5m-long section of his Chelsea Jeans store, across Broadway from St Paul's, in glass, creating a time capsule of the morning of September 11. More than US$1500 ($3212) worth of Levi jeans and Ralph Lauren sweaters are preserved in the memorial, forever coated in thick, grey ash and shreds of office paper.

And while planners wrangle over lasting ways to remember the disaster officially, one temporary memorial - The Sphere, a 20,000kg steel and bronze sculpture that originally stood in the fountain of the World Trade Centre plaza - is already drawing crowds.

Created by Fritz Koenig in 1971 to celebrate the ideal of world peace through international trade, the sculpture was badly damaged in the attack. Recovered during the clean-up, it was removed to nearby Battery Park.

In a March rededication ceremony in the park, city mayor Michael Bloomberg had this to say about the sculpture: "The Sphere that rests behind me in many ways symbolises New York. On September 11, it was damaged [but] not destroyed."

New York City

Case notes

Historical Lower Manhattan walking tours are offered on Saturday and Sunday mornings only. They cost US$15 ($32) a person, but those staying in a New York hotel for at least three nights may be eligible for free tickets. Further information is available at Ground Zero

The viewing platform at Fulton and Church Sts opens daily from 8am to 9pm. Free tickets are distributed on a first-come, first-served basis at the South St Seaport ticket booth at Pier 16 in Lower Manhattan. The booth is open from 10am to 6pm and distributes tickets for that day and the following morning. You will not be able to specify a time.

St Paul's Chapel is at 211 Broadway, between Fulton and Vessey Sts.

Chelsea Jeans is at 150 Broadway and is open every day from 10am.

Battery Park is on the southern tip of Manhattan, between State St, Battery Place and Whitehall St.