Tuesday afternoon

At the French Roast cafe on West 11th Street, a few shaken parents try to explain the situation to their children. "Our teacher came in and said, ‘Sorry, kids, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center, so you're not having any recess,' " says Anna Budinger, a second-grader at P.S. 41. The kids seem most concerned about missing playtime until Anna's mom, Amy, tells them that the tragedy was not an accident: "Bad people wanted to hurt the World Trade Center, so they made the planes crash on purpose."

After the second hit, Jeffrey Corbin, a psychiatrist at St. Clare's Hospital, was asked to help staff an observation area. A firefighter was the first to arrive, he says. "He thought he was having a heart attack. He wasn't — but he'd inhaled a lot of debris. As doctors worked on him, he started saying, ‘I don't know where my buddy is.' His team was at the first collapsed building trying to dig people out when the second building collapsed. His buddy just disappeared." Throughout the morning, security guards, firemen, and police officers described the scene to him. "Guys were saying, ‘I signed up to be a police officer, not to be in a war zone.' One woman came out of the building and looked up and saw a woman holding a baby in her arms jump out a window."

At around noon, Nancy Whiskey, on Church Street, is filled with sooty businessmen, construction workers, a chef, a mailman with a fat cigar. The TV is on, but no one's watching. Two guys in back are playing quarters. Everyone already seems very drunk. People are comparing how close they were at various times in the blast. "We should bomb the shit out of the whole Middle East," says one of the construction workers. "Take it over and make it ours. Then this oil crap won't matter."

"I know there are bodies in there," Father Alfred Guthrie, a Catholic priest, says to two firemen on Vesey Street as he climbs a pile of rubble perhaps twenty feet high. In a slow, mechanical voice, one says, "That building is going to fall." He points at No. 7, which is already listing. Father Guthrie climbs back out. "I have to get to the bodies," he says. He finds only one, with no sign of trauma, or religion. A policeman in tears grabs him — he'd lost brothers.

"I was on the 98th floor," says Kevin Dorrian, a carpenter leaning against a van on Franklin Street around 1:30 with some fellow union members. "I saw a friend of mine get blown out the window. He was right there, three feet from me. He was putting up blinds. I couldn't do nothing. I took the stairs down, past the fires. I saw a light, a fucking lamppost light, blow up. The glass flew into a person. Killed him immediately." Dorrian's waiting to be allowed to go back in, to dig through the rubble.

A man on a bike heads down nearly empty Park Avenue South, yelling, "Go to the hospitals! Donate blood!" Traffic on 23rd Street heading east, toward VA and NYU hospitals on First Avenue, is all ambulances. F-16s are streaking and booming overhead. "A little late," someone says.

In Washington Square Park, at about 2 p.m., Keith Stressler, a trader, is sitting on the edge of the fountain, smoking. His office is in 3 World Financial Center; he started running after the first tower came down. "I couldn't see anything; I didn't know where the fuck I was going. I just wanted to get away from any capitalist shit anyone would want to bomb. I figured the Village was safe."

On the corner of Park Place and West Broadway, it is as dark as night. Plumes of orange smoke curl out of the windows of 7 World Trade Center. A fireman says the building is going to collapse: "We've stopped trying to put out the fire." A strange calm envelops the street as several dozen cops, firemen, EMS workers, and INS people in black helmets and vests stare silently at the building. Pieces of No. 7 begin to fall. There are no sounds of impact; each landing is silenced by the thick carpet of dust and paper. Suddenly, just before 3 p.m., there are screams: "Clear the area. Everybody out. Now. The building's going to fall." Perhaps it's weariness, but nobody runs. Everyone just moves deliberately. The building doesn't fall yet.

At 3 p.m., Luke Murphy of MTV is walking more than 100 blocks home to East Harlem. His feet are killing him, and he stops to buy sneakers, only to find that everyone else in the city seems to have thought the same thing. He finally finds a pair in midtown — women's sneakers a few sizes too small. "I was lucky to get them," he says.

On Worth Street, "computer tech" Wilfred Samalot, wearing an Airborne Ranger jacket and a gas mask, is meticulously scraping dust into plastic bags, which he then neatly tucks into a carrier on the back of his bike. "I'm going to have it sent to a lab and checked for foreign chemicals and human remains," he explains.

In Gramercy Park, the locked iron gates are open to the public for the first time ever. People heading up from Irving Place crunch on the gray gravel.

A man and a woman shuffle along Canal Street, arm in arm; the woman is hysterical. "My son, he works up on the 100th floor . . . I gotta go see if my son is at Beekman . . . How do I get to Beekman? They won't let me go to Beekman?" A cop tries to calm her. "You should go home and try to call, or they will call you if they know anything," he says. "My father is at home, he's waiting by the phone, we don't know anything," she says, tears streaking down her face. "There's no way to go to Beekman? How do I get to Beekman?" The cop tries again to persuade her to go home, but she continues down Canal.

By 4 p.m., reinforcements at Engine Company 24 and Ladder Company 5, at Sixth Avenue and King Street, are waiting to go look for their friends. Thirteen men from the overnight shift had been among the first firefighters at the scene. "My husband's new," says one young woman crying in front of the station. "He just started."

Next: "They've got to get organized."