Exiting out of the Chambers Street Subway Station in New York City on the Friday before Memorial Day 2002, you could smell and taste the grit in the air.  Turning south on Church Street, you follow a policeman's directions.  The  sadness is in the air, from the Burger King Restaurant with "Triage Station" and "Temp. NYPD HQ" spray-painted on it to the scorched Federal courthouse.  Across the street, only an open expanse of devastation.  You're looking into Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.

There was no way to describe the scene other than this is what was left from the evil which struck here.  This evil was not the work of any Almighty's direction, but the work of madmen.  While I still cannot understand such work, Father Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R., a commentator on the Catholic television station EWTN who ministered to the dead and injured at the World Trade Center, said it best:  "The evildoers failed.  They destroyed the Twin Towers, which were just tools of ours, but they could not destroy what we are as Americans, a good people."

Enough of my commentary--I'll let the pictures one these pages speak their thousand words each...

Forlornly standing as a silent sentinel to the history,

the official tourism bureau marker for the World Trade Center greets you...

...as you turn sadly to face Ground Zero to the west.

As construction and emergency workers go about their sad chores...

...others toil putting New York City back together again,

without trying to pay attention at the destruction around them.

The cranes work mightily to raise debris and steel,

while a sign of faith offers comfort for how we feel.

Triage at Burger King saved more than a few that day,

while the scorched Federal courthouse awaits the evildoers' trial day.