Millions of 'pilgrims' visit Ground Zero

Tour guide Ann Van Hine is rewarded with tears, not tips, and frequently reduces visitors to an awed silence when she tells them how her husband, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001.

"Sometimes I feel bad because I look at people's faces as I'm telling my story and it's like I've just blown them away," Van Hine said after leading 25 tourists from as far afield as Italy and Australia on a tour around the perimeter of the gaping hole known as Ground Zero.

She says younger visitors often chat freely with her before the tour, but afterwards, "They don't know what to say to me."

As she is about to climb a steep flight of stairs to a walkway over the highway west of the site, Ms Van Hine asks visitors to imagine climbing stairs loaded up with firefighting equipment. "The firefighters got up to about the 70th floor, so it would have been like doing what we're doing 35 times."

She and her husband, Richard Bruce Van Hine, had two daughters aged 14 and 17 at the time of the attacks that killed 2,992 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

"Ten days after, I asked my girls where they thought Daddy was and they said they thought Daddy was in heaven," she said, adding that she visited Ground Zero on September 28, 2001.

"It looked like war," she said, standing with her back to the 16-acre site. "There were still fires burning, there was this grey dust everywhere. Some part of me I think expected to see a computer monitor or a desk or something. There was nothing."

Five years after two hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers, the debris has been entirely removed, leaving a hole several stories deep. Through the middle, above the surface, run a set of subway tracks.

To the south is an empty 41-storey skyscraper swathed in black netting, still contaminated by debris and mold that grew in the weeks after the attack when it was open to the elements. Workers dismantling it occasionally still find what may be bone shards in the building.

Dorry Tooker, a second guide on the free tours offered by the September 11 Families' Association between two and four times a day, points to another, taller tower to the east, and reminds visitors the Twin Towers were twice as high. Cristina Urbanek, a 33-year-old graduate student from Hamburg, Germany, said she saw them still standing in 1998.

"I wanted to see the difference," she said. "I thought it would make it a bit more real."

"I'm... a bit surprised so far there's no real memorial or anything," she said.

Construction of a memorial and the Freedom Tower on the site has been mired in controversy with families, city officials and architects wrangling over plans. A memorial costing $510 million is planned to be ready by September 11, 2009.

In the meantime, families of the dead have a makeshift building reserved for them within the perimeter. Ms Tooker, whose son, a firefighter, died in the North Tower, said it was mostly frequented by those whose relatives were never found.

"My son was found, so I don't feel that my son is here anymore. But for these people who haven't, they're still there."

St Paul's Chapel, next to Ground Zero, serves for many as an interim memorial. Though it was carpeted in dust and debris, it escaped serious damage and became a centre for rescue workers as well as a shrine where desperate relatives would leave flyers with photos of the missing, flowers, candles, poems and other gifts.

Many are still on display, along with computer terminals that allow a visitor to watch video clips of key moments in the aftermath. The Church holds daily prayers for the victims and will hold an interfaith service today.

Church worker Omayra Rivera, 33, said around a million visitors a year come to St Paul's. "They (Church officials) don't use the word 'tourists', they say 'pilgrims'."

Thousands of tourists congregate from morning to night every day on the west side of Ground Zero, peering through the fence, taking pictures, silently reading a timeline of the events of 9/11, and fending off the occasional peddler hawking collections of photographs of the attacks.

Souvenir sellers have been ordered out of the immediate area, though fire and police department T-shirts and caps as well as keyrings and bottle openers in the shape of the Twin Towers can still be purchased a few blocks away.

Some visitors choose to leave something behind. One message scrawled on one of wooden walkways around the site reads: "Yo, New York. I hope you are feeling better. I see that nasty scar is starting to heal... a... little."