On September 11th, 2001, Jonathan Doyle woke up early. The Sandler O'Neill investment banker had an 11am meeting in Boston. He thought about going to his office on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center's south tower for a few hours before catching a 10am flight.
He decided against it, fearing airport delays. Instead, he flew straight to Boston where he watched on television as terrorists reduced the Twin Towers to smouldering ash, killing 66 of Sandler's 171 employees.
Among those lost were chief executive Herman Sandler, investment banking head Christopher Quackenbush and many equity and bond traders. Stunned, Mr Doyle and a colleague jumped in a rental car and sped back to New York to begin the task of accounting for the boutique bank's dead while trying to keep the wounded business alive.
"Imagine trying to rebuild an existing firm, while basically hiring a whole new one, while every day you are also out going to hospitals, looking for your missing friends," Mr Doyle says. "It was unreal."
Five years later, Sandler O'Neill, with 262 employees, is bigger than it was on September 11th.
The bank, which focuses on financial companies, advised on North Fork's $14.6 billion sale to Capital One, PNC's purchase of Riggs National and initial public offerings by the Chicago Board of Trade and the International Securities Exchange.
Mr Doyle says he and his surviving colleagues never considered closing their doors.
"It never crossed my mind. Not for any gallant reason. I was just too busy with the tasks of continuity. I was too far down the road. Of course, we were going to keep going."
Sandler, like other banks hit hard by the attacks, got help from all over Wall Street as one-time competitors shared clients and office space. "There were no rivals," says Mr Doyle, now the bank's managing principal. "Everybody was a colleague."
After the initial shock subsided, Sandler set about rebuilding, employee by employee. And executives quickly noticed something remarkable.
Instead of shying away from the damaged firm, traders and bankers were banging down the door. Veteran Goldman Sachs executive Robert Castrignano, for instance, came out of retirement to rebuild Sandler's equity desk. Mr Doyle says part of the attraction was an opportunity to do something in the face of the attacks.
Similar resurrection stories emerge from two other small Wall Street securities firms devastated by the attacks: Cantor Fitzgerald and Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.
Cantor fared worst on September 11th, losing 658 employees. Howard Lutnick, chief executive, who lost his brother and only survived himself because he was taking his son to kindergarten, kept the operation going by elevating junior-level survivors to new positions of responsibility. "Privates became field generals," he says.
Cantor then began hiring and now employs 1,190 people in New York, up from 960 before September 11th. It pledged to give a quarter of its profits to families of employees killed for five years, and has so far given $180 million.
Bruyette appears on track for a delayed initial public offering. The bank, which lost 67 workers in the attack, including chief executive John Duffy's 23-year-old son, is now nearly twice its pre-September 11th size and earned $17.4 million in 2005.
Still, while the boutique banks have largely recovered, they have not flocked back to lower Manhattan, though Cantor has a satellite office there. For many survivors, the memories of that crystal clear September morning remain too raw.
