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September 7, 2003 -- Two years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the 16-acre site now known as Ground Zero has become a faded memory for most - it sits mostly paved over and populated by cranes and construction crews. As life rushes past, The Post watched, capturing 24 hours in the life of Ground Zero, from sunrise to sunrise.
6 a.m.: Downtown is quiet. You could hear a pin drop on Church Street. The Twin Towers have been rubble for almost two years. Still, the pedestrians who walk by look up.
6:11: Buses carrying sleepy commuters emerge from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. A police car is parked on Church Street outside the Century 21 department store. A cop in the passenger seat is asleep.
6:20: Stephen McCann, who builds platforms in the Ground Zero pit, arrives for work and has his picture identification scanned by a security guard in an orange vest. "After a while it becomes another job site," McCann says. "But you get to go down in the hole."
6:24: The sun officially rises, but it's hard to tell. The overcast sky makes it still seem like night.
6:52: Newspapers arrive at a Church Street newsstand. The headlines are depressing: A man was shot and killed at a Brooklyn parade. Someone tried to rape a woman in Prospect Park.
6:59: Klea Bourbakis climbs a flight of stairs on the work site's south side to the overpass that carries her and other pedestrians to West Street. "Everybody's looking forward to the environment changing," says the project coordinator for an interior fitting company. "Nobody likes looking at this."
8:03: Sitting in their truck off the West Side Highway, James Blewett and Frank Marcario eat their bagels. The surveyors' shift starts soon, and they hate going down in the hole. "It's always going to be emotional," Blewett says. "There's no getting around it."
8:46: The clock outside Century 21 shows the same time the first hijacked jet plunged into the north tower.
8:51: A traffic agent tickets a Chevy Tahoe on Vesey Street.
9:03: A clock outside The Smoke Shop on Vesey Street shows the same time the second hijacked jet plunged into the south tower.
9:06: City Council Speaker Gifford Miller rushes by, late for a forum on economic recovery. "It's critical to this country that New York City recover, and recover fully, from the most devastating attack on American soil," Miller later tells a group that includes members of congress and the New York County Lawyers Association. Miller doesn't need charts and spreadsheets to make his point. Ground Zero is a half-block away.
10:02: Rain begins to fall. Vendors cover their "Ground Zero" hats and "IòNY" T-shirts. It's time to sell umbrellas.
10:40: A brief constellation of flashes lights up a section of Church Street. Nothing is happening below, but that doesn't stop the picture-takers from capturing the moment with their digital and disposable cameras. "We came back to see how far they've gotten," says Dale Coppenbarger, 38, of Leesburg, Fla., who is huddled under an umbrella with his 15-year-old daughter, Jessica Davis. Jessica has an audition with the American School of Ballet. They've been here before.
10:45: The rain has slowed work in the pit. Several construction workers take a break and like rock stars behind metal fencing, chat with tourists along Church Street.
11:07: Mark O'Byrne, 46, of Cosmos Tours, leads a group of British tourists. "People always ask me, 'Mark, what street was that?' as if it was singular. But I try to explain - it was every street."
12:07 p.m.: Fifteen demonstrators - relatives of men and women killed at the World Trade Center - gather to protest their belief that Gov. Pataki broke his promise to preserve the "footprints" of the Twin Towers as sacred ground. "I'm glad I didn't have to arrest anybody," says a Port Authority police officer. "It would have been very awkward."
12:47: Bruce DeCell hangs around longer than the others. His son-in-law, Daniel Petrocelli, was killed in the attack. More of Daniel's remains were identified recently. It was the fifth time. "My daughter was traumatized all over again," DeCell says. "This makes you go a little bit crazy."
1:50: Feige Tannenbaum and a friend, charging toward Century 21, stop in their tracks. "When you're home, you forget about it," Tannenbaum says, looking into the tremendous hole in the ground. "When you come here, it's sad."
2:46: From one of the vendors, Jeff Mendelowitz, 42, from Clearwater, Fla., buys two FDNY and two NYPD T-shirts for friends back home. "I figured they would be more meaningful because of where they were picked up - right at the site," he says.
3:01: Four young Asian women from Vancouver ask a German woman to take their photo in front of the pit. Barbara Lutterbeck obliges them and then asks where a good deli can be found.
4:03: A tune wafts around the overcast day. Paul Belpasso, in an NYPD cap, plays "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Amazing Grace" and "America the Beautiful" - and wants to be paid for his services.
4:47: Gripping N.Y. Dolls fliers, Jorge Garcia adjusts his tie. He gets $6 an hour as he tries to lure folks into the downtown strip club. "But they pay me more if I wear a tie."
5:19: A driver in a yellow pick-up truck leans on his horn as workers stream out of the Ground Zero pit. The workers do not budge.
7:00: Downtown workers appear then disappear into the subways around Ground Zero, changing places with residents who live nearby. A few steal a glance at the site. Amy Simmons, 27, a lawyer for the General Services Administration, hustles past the pit on her way home. "I really actually try not to look at it," she says.
7:25: Fog settles in over the neighborhood. Structures like the Woolworth Building and the World Financial Center, that didn't seem so tall two years ago, are suddenly majestic.
7:26: The weak sun officially sets.
7:51: Maureen Lonieski calls her 90-year-old grandmother on her cell phone as she leans on the fence and peers into the pit. She updates her on the rebuilding progress.
8:02: A police truck slowly cruises along the inside perimeter near Church Street. The driver is wearing sunglasses against the pit's blinding floodlights.
8:04: Officer Aldy Gonzalez stands on Church Street pointing at thin air so his partner Sam Ouk can get a better sense of where the towers stood. At any given time, about 50 extra officers from outlying precincts are brought to the site to beef up security. Gonzalez and Ouk are from the 76 in Brooklyn. Gonzalez was here when the towers fell.
8:07: Electrical workers change streetlights and crosswalk lights along Church Street from incandescent bulbs to energy-efficient light-emitting diodes - expected to save the city $4 million a year.
8:45: Ernesto Garcia, a vendor on Liberty Street, breaks down his stand for the evening in frustration. "It should stay a memorial," he says of the site. He packs up his "Iraq's Most Wanted" playing cards and goes home.
9:05: Sam Can, a young officer in the Israeli military, got off a plane an hour ago. "Before Sept. 11, people say attacks in Israel were just from Palestinians," he says in broken English. "After Sept. 11, people understand it's terror. It's all terror."
9:12: An ambulance idles on Church Street. Inside, Jason Morrissey waits for his ex-girlfriend, Shelby Feld, 19, from Long Island, to show up. Shelby has been coming to see Jason at the site for six months now. Sometimes she brings her friends. She says she still loves Jason. When Jason gets a call, she sits in her car working on homework and waits for him to come back.
10:50: Sal Locci and Dee Wiley take a break from working on the site's sewer system, which was torn apart. "There's nothing to think about anymore," Locci says of Ground Zero. "You have to move on."
11:15: Morrissey still hasn't returned from his ambulance call, so Shelby finally starts the car and leaves for the night.
11:23: Electricians from Local 3 return from dinner. They've been working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week for the last three months to meet a Nov. 11 deadline to restore power to the PATH station.
12:13 a.m.: Using a power washer that fires soap and water at 4,000 pounds per square inch, Mike La Pastina, 38, a Port Authority maintenance man, blasts a gob of gum from the sidewalk on Church Street.
1:15: Alfredo Garcia, a sandwich-maker and cashier at Charly's all-night deli on Trinity Place, rings up two bottles of Poland Spring water and two bottles of orange Gatorade for a thirsty construction worker who's been toiling on underground pipes right outside the shop.
1:32: Four Financial District yuppies dressed in dark suits stumble by the site on Church Street, howling with laughter after one drops his slice of mushroom pizza. He eats it anyway. "We've had a few," he says.
2:47: On the corner of Park Place and West Broadway, Jean Auxilas, pulls out a hose and vacuums human waste from one of the 50 temporary restrooms used at Ground Zero into his truck's 5,000-gallon tank. "There's nothing to like about it," he says of the area.
3:10: Robert, a 25-year- old security guard at the ruined hulk of 7 World Trade Center, flips to a game show on the black-and-white TV he brings with him each night to his booth. He bought the TV on the street for $10.
3:26: Up the street, Mark Franciscovich, 31, an excavator from Staten Island, climbs up from three stories below Park Place, where he has been installing exhaust fans for the new 1 and 9 subway lines, to buy a chocolate doughnut.
3:31: A light breeze swirls north up Church Street, curling an American flag that waves above Ground Zero. Not a soul stirs on the street. The city is asleep.
4:30: Twenty workers head home after a 12-hour shift installing wires, pipe and struts on the underground slurry wall. "It's absolutely exhausting," Says Jacko Favia, 42, an electrician from Queens.
5:40: Mauro Manfe, a nightclub promoter, arrives home exhausted and flops into bed. His Cedar Street apartment abuts Ground Zero. From his living room he can look right down into the pit.
6:00: Dawn breaks humidly. Another day begins.
6 a.m.: Downtown is quiet. You could hear a pin drop on Church Street. The Twin Towers have been rubble for almost two years. Still, the pedestrians who walk by look up.
6:11: Buses carrying sleepy commuters emerge from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. A police car is parked on Church Street outside the Century 21 department store. A cop in the passenger seat is asleep.
6:20: Stephen McCann, who builds platforms in the Ground Zero pit, arrives for work and has his picture identification scanned by a security guard in an orange vest. "After a while it becomes another job site," McCann says. "But you get to go down in the hole."
6:24: The sun officially rises, but it's hard to tell. The overcast sky makes it still seem like night.
6:52: Newspapers arrive at a Church Street newsstand. The headlines are depressing: A man was shot and killed at a Brooklyn parade. Someone tried to rape a woman in Prospect Park.
6:59: Klea Bourbakis climbs a flight of stairs on the work site's south side to the overpass that carries her and other pedestrians to West Street. "Everybody's looking forward to the environment changing," says the project coordinator for an interior fitting company. "Nobody likes looking at this."
8:03: Sitting in their truck off the West Side Highway, James Blewett and Frank Marcario eat their bagels. The surveyors' shift starts soon, and they hate going down in the hole. "It's always going to be emotional," Blewett says. "There's no getting around it."
8:46: The clock outside Century 21 shows the same time the first hijacked jet plunged into the north tower.
8:51: A traffic agent tickets a Chevy Tahoe on Vesey Street.
9:03: A clock outside The Smoke Shop on Vesey Street shows the same time the second hijacked jet plunged into the south tower.
9:06: City Council Speaker Gifford Miller rushes by, late for a forum on economic recovery. "It's critical to this country that New York City recover, and recover fully, from the most devastating attack on American soil," Miller later tells a group that includes members of congress and the New York County Lawyers Association. Miller doesn't need charts and spreadsheets to make his point. Ground Zero is a half-block away.
10:02: Rain begins to fall. Vendors cover their "Ground Zero" hats and "IòNY" T-shirts. It's time to sell umbrellas.
10:40: A brief constellation of flashes lights up a section of Church Street. Nothing is happening below, but that doesn't stop the picture-takers from capturing the moment with their digital and disposable cameras. "We came back to see how far they've gotten," says Dale Coppenbarger, 38, of Leesburg, Fla., who is huddled under an umbrella with his 15-year-old daughter, Jessica Davis. Jessica has an audition with the American School of Ballet. They've been here before.
10:45: The rain has slowed work in the pit. Several construction workers take a break and like rock stars behind metal fencing, chat with tourists along Church Street.
11:07: Mark O'Byrne, 46, of Cosmos Tours, leads a group of British tourists. "People always ask me, 'Mark, what street was that?' as if it was singular. But I try to explain - it was every street."
12:07 p.m.: Fifteen demonstrators - relatives of men and women killed at the World Trade Center - gather to protest their belief that Gov. Pataki broke his promise to preserve the "footprints" of the Twin Towers as sacred ground. "I'm glad I didn't have to arrest anybody," says a Port Authority police officer. "It would have been very awkward."
12:47: Bruce DeCell hangs around longer than the others. His son-in-law, Daniel Petrocelli, was killed in the attack. More of Daniel's remains were identified recently. It was the fifth time. "My daughter was traumatized all over again," DeCell says. "This makes you go a little bit crazy."
1:50: Feige Tannenbaum and a friend, charging toward Century 21, stop in their tracks. "When you're home, you forget about it," Tannenbaum says, looking into the tremendous hole in the ground. "When you come here, it's sad."
2:46: From one of the vendors, Jeff Mendelowitz, 42, from Clearwater, Fla., buys two FDNY and two NYPD T-shirts for friends back home. "I figured they would be more meaningful because of where they were picked up - right at the site," he says.
3:01: Four young Asian women from Vancouver ask a German woman to take their photo in front of the pit. Barbara Lutterbeck obliges them and then asks where a good deli can be found.
4:03: A tune wafts around the overcast day. Paul Belpasso, in an NYPD cap, plays "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Amazing Grace" and "America the Beautiful" - and wants to be paid for his services.
4:47: Gripping N.Y. Dolls fliers, Jorge Garcia adjusts his tie. He gets $6 an hour as he tries to lure folks into the downtown strip club. "But they pay me more if I wear a tie."
5:19: A driver in a yellow pick-up truck leans on his horn as workers stream out of the Ground Zero pit. The workers do not budge.
7:00: Downtown workers appear then disappear into the subways around Ground Zero, changing places with residents who live nearby. A few steal a glance at the site. Amy Simmons, 27, a lawyer for the General Services Administration, hustles past the pit on her way home. "I really actually try not to look at it," she says.
7:25: Fog settles in over the neighborhood. Structures like the Woolworth Building and the World Financial Center, that didn't seem so tall two years ago, are suddenly majestic.
7:26: The weak sun officially sets.
7:51: Maureen Lonieski calls her 90-year-old grandmother on her cell phone as she leans on the fence and peers into the pit. She updates her on the rebuilding progress.
8:02: A police truck slowly cruises along the inside perimeter near Church Street. The driver is wearing sunglasses against the pit's blinding floodlights.
8:04: Officer Aldy Gonzalez stands on Church Street pointing at thin air so his partner Sam Ouk can get a better sense of where the towers stood. At any given time, about 50 extra officers from outlying precincts are brought to the site to beef up security. Gonzalez and Ouk are from the 76 in Brooklyn. Gonzalez was here when the towers fell.
8:07: Electrical workers change streetlights and crosswalk lights along Church Street from incandescent bulbs to energy-efficient light-emitting diodes - expected to save the city $4 million a year.
8:45: Ernesto Garcia, a vendor on Liberty Street, breaks down his stand for the evening in frustration. "It should stay a memorial," he says of the site. He packs up his "Iraq's Most Wanted" playing cards and goes home.
9:05: Sam Can, a young officer in the Israeli military, got off a plane an hour ago. "Before Sept. 11, people say attacks in Israel were just from Palestinians," he says in broken English. "After Sept. 11, people understand it's terror. It's all terror."
9:12: An ambulance idles on Church Street. Inside, Jason Morrissey waits for his ex-girlfriend, Shelby Feld, 19, from Long Island, to show up. Shelby has been coming to see Jason at the site for six months now. Sometimes she brings her friends. She says she still loves Jason. When Jason gets a call, she sits in her car working on homework and waits for him to come back.
10:50: Sal Locci and Dee Wiley take a break from working on the site's sewer system, which was torn apart. "There's nothing to think about anymore," Locci says of Ground Zero. "You have to move on."
11:15: Morrissey still hasn't returned from his ambulance call, so Shelby finally starts the car and leaves for the night.
11:23: Electricians from Local 3 return from dinner. They've been working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week for the last three months to meet a Nov. 11 deadline to restore power to the PATH station.
12:13 a.m.: Using a power washer that fires soap and water at 4,000 pounds per square inch, Mike La Pastina, 38, a Port Authority maintenance man, blasts a gob of gum from the sidewalk on Church Street.
1:15: Alfredo Garcia, a sandwich-maker and cashier at Charly's all-night deli on Trinity Place, rings up two bottles of Poland Spring water and two bottles of orange Gatorade for a thirsty construction worker who's been toiling on underground pipes right outside the shop.
1:32: Four Financial District yuppies dressed in dark suits stumble by the site on Church Street, howling with laughter after one drops his slice of mushroom pizza. He eats it anyway. "We've had a few," he says.
2:47: On the corner of Park Place and West Broadway, Jean Auxilas, pulls out a hose and vacuums human waste from one of the 50 temporary restrooms used at Ground Zero into his truck's 5,000-gallon tank. "There's nothing to like about it," he says of the area.
3:10: Robert, a 25-year- old security guard at the ruined hulk of 7 World Trade Center, flips to a game show on the black-and-white TV he brings with him each night to his booth. He bought the TV on the street for $10.
3:26: Up the street, Mark Franciscovich, 31, an excavator from Staten Island, climbs up from three stories below Park Place, where he has been installing exhaust fans for the new 1 and 9 subway lines, to buy a chocolate doughnut.
3:31: A light breeze swirls north up Church Street, curling an American flag that waves above Ground Zero. Not a soul stirs on the street. The city is asleep.
4:30: Twenty workers head home after a 12-hour shift installing wires, pipe and struts on the underground slurry wall. "It's absolutely exhausting," Says Jacko Favia, 42, an electrician from Queens.
5:40: Mauro Manfe, a nightclub promoter, arrives home exhausted and flops into bed. His Cedar Street apartment abuts Ground Zero. From his living room he can look right down into the pit.
6:00: Dawn breaks humidly. Another day begins.
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