WP,pg1: "Some days the hole in the heart of NYC appears healed over."

[DeepModem Mom]

After Attacks Changed the World, The Recovery Changed a City
Near Ground Zero, a New Version of Life Goes On
By Michael Powell and Michelle García
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 9, 2006; Page A01


Across from the World Trade Center site, the rhythms of New York life have resumed. (By Mario Tama -- Getty Images)

....Some days the hole in the heart of this city appears healed over. The braggadocio is back and the jackhammers rattle near Ground Zero. The scar that is the 16-acre hole is still there, a monument to political paralysis. But a forest of blue condominium towers rises, Hermes and Tiffany are opening shops downtown, Goldman Sachs is throwing up a 43-story office tower, and those Viking-stoved, Jacuzzi-ed lofts still attract high-roller bid-a-thons.

More than 5,800 apartments have been built in Lower Manhattan since 2001, and the median residential sales price has jumped 75 percent. Big corporations -- the Bank of New York, Goldman and Moody's Investors Service -- are building millions of square feet of new office space....

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So if you measure health by beautiful offices and million-dollar lofts -- and what upper-middle-class New Yorker hasn't these past five years? -- you might conclude that all's swell....

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Less clear is what the years since have done to the ephemera that make up a city's soul. Sarah Fisch is a classic New Yorker, in that she arrived in 2000 from somewhere else -- Texas, in her case -- and is pretty intense about her new home. After the attacks, her little subculture of poets and performance artists flowered....

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Then rents rose so high in Lower Manhattan, the tiny theaters and poetry clubs shuttered. People began to move, to Seattle, Yonkers, wherever. Fisch was broke and sick, and she saw the makeshift memorials in Union Square every day as she walked to one temporary job or another....No more starving artist; she wants a PhD so she can get a steady teaching job. She too is the determined face of post-9/11 New York.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/08/AR2006090801578.html?sub=AR