A Decade after 9/11 - World Trade Center | New York

You can feel the urgent throb of New York from the moment you've passed through the immigration post at John F Kennedy airport. First you are hustled by pirate cabbies trying to lure you to their $100-a-ride limos on the other side of the legitimate ranks. Then, when you've sensibly queued for a yellow cab, you are catapulted onto the Long Island Expressway, bounced, buffeted and banged around as you swerve past Shea Stadium, the Queens projects and the gigantic billboards promising eternal youth and beauty, and finally you sail serenely across the Queensboro Bridge with the skyline of the greatest city in the world laid out in front of you. What exhilaration.

The only time this frequently taken thrill ride has not charged me up was precisely 10 years ago, in the days after the terrorist attack on 9/11. I'd arrived soon after that dreadful Tuesday to cover events for this newspaper, and although the yellow cab provided the traditional jolting journey, the first sighting of that skyline was a shock. In place of the gleaming twin towers was a plume of black smoke that would be a blot on the Manhattan skyline for months to come.

Now that plume has long gone; on the ride into the city now you can just make out One World Trade Center, the controversial yet-to-be completed replacement for the twin towers.

At $3 billion (£1.86 billion) it will be the most expensive office building ever constructed in the United States; it forms part of an $11 billion (£7 billion) group of buildings, train station, memorial gardens and museum on a site that, up to now, has been called Ground Zero.