The bitter lesson of Ground Zero

On bustling Park Avenue South, near my midtown Manhattan home, the local branch of Staples the stationers is still plastered with photos of the missing of 11 September, alongside the phone numbers of anxious relatives.

Six months on, their fates are all known - ie, most are among the 3,000-plus dead - but no one can bear to take those pictures down. In the world headquarters of capitalism, even commerce surrenders to sentiment as those poignant faces obscure the Staples window display.

Will they ever come down, I find myself wondering as most days I wander by? In many respects New York has slowly but surely returned to its normal, frenetic, vibrant self. In others, of course, it can never be the same again.

The self-styled capital of the world has lost its innocence - and much of its arrogance. More than most Britons realise, chastened New Yorkers are stunned to discover how much they and all Americans are hated by so much of the world - not just their fanatical foes, but even some of their supposed allies - and are anxious to understand why.

Feelings about the open-ended "war on terrorism", and its potential expansion into Iraq and the other members of President Bush's notorious "axis of evil" are decidedly mixed, often vocally anti. New Yorkers, like many of their hitherto gung-ho fellow countrymen, have finally joined the human race as part of the sentient, thinking, caring world community.

Meanwhile, after more than two centuries of feeling invulnerable, this is a city on permanent high alert (as ordered by the government), wary of the second attack many see as not just likely but inevitable.

But how will that next attack come? Via the seething subway, so vulnerable to anthrax or other chemical weapons? Or from the air again, as we look up apprehensively at each passenger jet criss-crossing the azure Manhattan sky (while giving silent thanks we're not aboard)? A nuclear attack, even? Nothing is now beyond belief in the open-ended taproom discussions of how brave we've all been since 9/11, as that surreal day is universally known, and how vigilant we must remain.

Downtown at Ground Zero, there is now little to see from the viewing platform especially erected for tourists. Salvage work continues - and bodies (or body parts) are still being discovered - out of sight, underground, where there was a mini-city, complete with shopping mall, almost as massive as the World Trade Centre's twin towers themselves.

The air is still foul with the stench of death and destruction, leaving many workers and local residents understandably concerned about the long-term effect on their health. But it is some weeks since the harbour winds blew that gruesome smell the three miles north to my midtown balcony, where it was still pungent over Christmas.

The holiday season was a turning-point for New Yorkers, unofficially marking the end of the city's prolonged paralysis and a readiness to get back to life as usual. On New Year's Day, The New York Times stopped printing a special daily supplement entitled A Nation Challenged, containing coverage of 9/11 and its consequences, including those potted biographies of the dead which struck a chord on both sides of the Atlantic.

The New Yorker magazine also ran a special issue of cartoons reassuring us that it was at last OK to laugh again. One of them showed a typical New Yorker drawling to his wife: "What a relief. Thank God I can be nasty to people again." For a bizarre few months, the eight million disparate citizens of this teeming, every-man-for-himself metropolis - 40 per cent of them born (like me) overseas - became unusually polite to each other, helping little old ladies across the street and substituting a smiling "Hi, how ya doin?" for the more familiar snarl: "Hey, buddy, what's your problem?"

Always a useful index of city life, they say business has now picked up again after a disastrously fallow period. For months, people didn't go out socially - partly out of sheer fear, partly because it was deemed unseemly to be having a good time. The dead are, of course, still honoured, as they soon will be by a permanent memorial, and the cops and firemen greeted around town with an enthusiasm unfamiliar to all concerned. But the worst-case scenario - feared and fought off by the heroic ex-Mayor Rudi Giuliani - has not come to pass. After a brief wobble, Broadway is doing booming business again, and the tourists have begun to return in their usual droves.

Tina Brown's Talk magazine may be one prominent casualty of 9/11, as advertising slumped disastrously. But the Clinton boom was over anyway. The downturn had already begun. For a few dire months it was exacerbated by 9/11, but the stock market recovered with remarkable speed, and capitalism now reigns again.

New York is also, of course, home to the United Nations, which will have a crucial role to play in the tense months (and years) ahead as the belligerent Bush cynically uses the attack on America as a route towards his re-election.

Tony Blair should think carefully before continuing his apparent support for the conflict's extension into Iraq. He will be the only world leader who offers Bush any such comfort, let alone troops. Britain will be out on an unpopular limb in the international community.

This week two dramatic pillars of light will invade the Manhattan sky, a temporary memorial to symbolise what the World Trade Centre used to be - and soon will be again - as rebuilding plans are finalised.

Britons should know that this is not merely another show of American triumphalism. Many New Yorkers share their apprehension about an indefinite conflict which may even be unwinnable.

Thanks to 9/11, New Yorkers and many other Americans now at last grasp that the US cannot assume it rules the world. Nor, as they struggle to get their lives back to normal, do they any longer want it to.

Anthony Holden is a British writer living in New York

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