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For the various groups and individuals who have joined in and benefited from the relief effort, the focus is on parlaying their new identities into something permanent. St. Paul's Chapel, next to one of the clearest views of ground zero, is no longer open to its parishioners. Since the 11th, it has provided workers from the site with food, beds, work boots, massages, chiropractic services, Red Bulls and cigarettes. Cots once reserved for the homeless are now used by ironworkers looking for a mid-shift nap. The chapel is the oldest religious building in New York City, but it was down to 30 regulars and tried to reinvent itself for Generation Y with services that experimented with jazz, rock music and PowerPoint presentations. In the three months since the attacks, the church has been flooded with donations. Now the Rev. Samuel Johnson Howard is trying to figure out how to turn the church into a memorial: "If a shrine is somewhere people travel to intentionally to remember holy things, then I think St. Paul's will always be a shrine."
The church is already carefully storing the thousands of signs, poems and stuffed animals left by the throngs, often six or seven rows deep, who have transformed the gates of the church into a wall of grief. St. Paul's now generates its own artifacts by hanging fresh canvases outside on which visitors can write messages. Demand to volunteer at the church is so high that it can assign two people each day simply to hand out pens for the duration of their 12-hr. shifts. Al Farrar, 55, took three days off from work to travel by bus from Pinckney, Mich., with other members of his church for a day of pen duty. "My dad was at Pearl Harbor the day it was bombed. I didn't see it. My parents lived through the Depression. I didn't see it. I wanted to see this," he says.
Most visitors come to ground zero looking for some kind of catharsis. At first they made makeshift memorials: a huge pile of stuffed animals left by co-workers of dead flight attendants, a diorama of Barbie and Ken in fire-fighter uniforms, an abandoned bicycle labeled as a messenger tribute. But now organized religion has rushed into the emotional void. Early this month 12 teenagers from Canada, chaperoned by six adults, came for the week to man three prayer stations along the perimeter for an organization called Youth with a Mission. "We pray for anybody about anything," says Terry Halcrow, 45. "We're not here to be kooks." Other spiritual entrepreneurs also circulate around ground zero, including Scientologists, Rabbi Schneerson's Mitzvah Tank and Billy Graham's New York Prayer Center.
Amid all the professionalization, the few remaining amateurs stand two miles up the West Side Highway. At Point Thank You on the "Hero Highway," people still wait in the cold, cheering the passing traffic with signs such as SANITATION ROCKS. John Dennie, 60, has commuted every day from Staten Island to Point Thank You for more than two months. "I came for the Columbus Day parade and was hooked after five minutes," he says. A volunteer standing next to him, who asks not to be named to avoid taking credit, says, "There's not much the average New Yorker can do to help anymore. Everything seems to be taken." The man scans the highway, looking in vain for more emergency vehicles. "Things are getting back to normal in New York," he says. "The other day a driver yelled, 'Get a life,' and gave me the finger."