Dawn broke slowly in Manhattan yesterday as New Yorkers awoke with a singular question: did yesterday really happen or was it just a terrible nightmare? The silence on the streets confirmed the reality that life would never be the same for America or this city. Gone was the din of the early-morning garbage trucks that are the bane of New Yorkers. No honking horns or sounds of traffic. The only sound - eerie and disconcerting - was the roar of F-16 fighters high in the skys.
The rivers that bookend this island, the East River and the Hudson River, were no longer filled with pleasure boats. Instead, the waterways were shared by Navy vessels on patrol and ferries carrying bodies to a makeshift morgue in New Jersey.
All of lower Manhattan below 14th Street was closed to the public, both pedestrians and traffic. All of the familiar neighbourhoods- Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Chinatown, Soho, Wall Street, Tribeca - were cut off from the rest of the city. Police were stationed at intersections and checked everyone for identification. Nearly anything would do, but it had to show you were a resident here a utility bill, a rent receipt, a telephone bill.
On the car-less streets, people walked trying to find a newspaper but there were none; newspaper trucks were not allowed into lower Manhattan.
In this city of immigrants, each group felt the impact. The news-stand owners, many of them Indian immigrants, stood at corners apologising for the absence of papers.
The Greeks, who run so many of the coffee shops, did a brisk business. The Koreans, who run so many of the nail salons and beauty parlours, kept their businesses shuttered.
And the Irish-Americans, who constitute substantial numbers of the city's fire and police departments, mourned the losses of their own even as they continued to search for survivors in the rubble of what used to be the World Trade Centre.
A prominent lawyer sat in her office high above Manhattan, looking at the area where the twin towers once stood.
"I don't know why I came into the office today, there is really nothing to do," she said.
"But you don't want to give these f***ers the satisfaction. We have got to keep going." She mentioned, as many others did, that she had received calls from overseas.
"The pictures on television there, on the BBC, are much more graphic. They are not letting us see how bad it is." She was correct. CNN's executives monitored the video footage and prevented the most gruesome pictures from being broadcast.
Then the lawyer asked the question every New Yorker was asking. "Did you know anyone?" A businessman was walking across 14th Street about 10 a.m., his mobile phone to his ear.
"Yeah, I'm okay. But we have one of our guys missing. He didn't make it home last night. We're worried."
The local television stations were taking calls from viewers.
"I am looking for my son," said a woman with a shaking voice. "His name is Stephen and he works in the World Trade Centre. He is wearing a white shirt and green pants."
She then gave her home telephone number in New Jersey for anyone to call. The news presenter did her best to comfort the woman and pretend there was a likelihood her son would turn up safe.
That likelihood was remote.
Mark Ackerman, the chief administrator of St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, which was one of three main hospitals caring for the wounded, was sorry there weren't more survivors.
"We are here to take care of everyone we see. But unfortunately we are not seeing the number of survivors that we hoped for. We wish we were busier," he said. By midday, area hospitals had admitted only a little more than a thousand patients.
But the search went on. Earthquake experts, experienced in digging for survivors in collapsed buildings, brought in sniffer dogs. Every 45 minutes, all searches halted as teams stopped for a minute to listen; could a cry be heard, any sound?
One policeman was buried in the rubble up to his waist. But he had a mobile phone and knew intimately the layout of the twin towers complex. He called police and told them exactly where he was, trapped beneath debris in the mall area that had separated the buildings. Though he could not see where he was, he guided rescuers to him. He was saved.
The intense activity of downtown was limited, however. Most New Yorkers struggled with a peculiar and enforced sense of idleness. Life could not go on as usual; little work could be done. But something must happen.
"I want to help but I don't know what I should do," said one woman as she got her morning coffee at a pastry shop. "I went to the hospital and they said they didn't need any more blood." That was indeed a bad sign; in the hour after the tragedy struck on Tuesday morning, hospitals called for blood donors.
But the scant number of survivors changed all that.
The famous and the obscure wanted to help. Kathleen Turner and Valerie Harper turned up at a hospital to donate blood but were told to come back later.
Helen Hunt joined some friends at a Greenwich Village restaurant that was open and left a $250 tip for charity.
Would life get back to normal soon? Some people hoped so, but more people, in fact, hoped not. A morning poll showed 90 percent of Americans were willing to go to war with the country or countries that have harboured terrorists. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo recalled the aftermath of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre.
"We said our lives would never be the same, and yet we went back to the way we lived. Our resilience worked against us. We have to change the way we live.
We have to understand that this is a different world. And we can do it, without sacrificing our liberties."