New York half lives in the sky, so when hijacked airplanes destroyed the Twin Towers, it was perhaps inevitable that the traumatized city would build another skyscraper -- even higher.
Yet it has taken 10 years since September 11, 2001, billions of dollars and embarrassing infighting between New York's leaders for that skyline to start healing.
Few called the Twin Towers beautiful, but they were epic and along with the Empire State Building they anchored Manhattan. Symbolizing American financial power, and housing people from around the planet, the World Trade Center was never just office space.
Rick Bell, executive director at the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, remembers a feeling of awe in the top floor bar Windows on the World.
"You saw the whole world at your feet and not just the buildings and lights of the buildings, but the harbor and the lights and the ocean," Bell told AFP.
"Was it like looking down at people as if they were bugs? Absolutely not. It was looking out to a vantage point beyond one's own turf... really to the heavens."
Losing those two towers within minutes not only killed nearly 3,000 people, but shredded the self-confidence of a city that has skyscrapers in its DNA.
And that emotion, added to the sheer physical challenge, meant reconstruction of the World Trade Center -- or even deciding on a replacement -- was never going to be easy.
For years, architects fought, developers fought, and politicians either got in the way or failed to lead. Ground Zero, as the site was known, remained an ugly hole.
"An enormity of time was spent trying to determine" how to proceed, admits Larry Silverstein, the developer who had bought the lease to the Twin Towers weeks before the attacks and battled bitterly with the insurance companies afterwards.
What emerged was a plan for an entirely new World Trade Center.
The now three-quarter finished main tower will reach 1,776 feet (541 meters), becoming the tallest building in the country. Tower two will be slightly shorter, followed by the still shorter towers three and four.
Between them will be a brand new train hub, huge underground retail space, the subterranean 9/11 museum and a haunting memorial consisting of vast, dark fountains descending into the square footprints of the disappeared Twin Towers.
Far from everyone is happy.
Although the half-finished main tower will be taller than the old Twin Towers, critics see its angled surfaces and mirrored skin as blandly corporate, lacking the punch of its brutal, but impressive predecessors.
Paul Goldberger, who writes about architecture for The New Yorker, calls 1 World Trade Center "a banal building designed, it would seem, more by security consultants than by its architect, David Childs."
Other critics say the delays and costs amount to a giant boondoggle.
Although the memorial is ready for this tenth anniversary of 9/11, tower one won't top out at 104 floors until next year and the rest of the site in about 2016, almost a generation after the attacks and at a cost now estimated at $11 billion, much of it government subsidized.
The World Trade Center is "9/11's white elephant" and illustrates "just about everything wrong with modern government," wrote New York Times columnist Joe Nocera.
To be fair, there could never have been a harder project to pull off.
Many Americans consider Ground Zero hallowed ground and that sensitivity -- or at times raw patriotism and politicking -- turns every issue, large and small, into a minefield.
Should retail activity be allowed? How do you arrange the names of all the dead around the fountains? What about the hundreds of victims whose remains have never been found? Should a proposed Islamic center be permitted two blocks away?
The memorial is probably the only piece of the puzzle to meet with universal approval.
Simple and arresting, the two great holes and their walls of vanishing water are sure to become among the nation's most cherished monuments.
1 World Trade Center also has its enthusiastic backers, who highlight unparalleled attention in the architecture to environmental concerns, safety and livability.
"The times have changed," Bell said. "Part of the reason for the attack had to do with world politics, so it's all the more appropriate that... we make our environment less reliant on archaic forms of energy production and we be a little more forward looking."
After so much heartache, the 10th anniversary finds many New Yorkers simply keen to move on.
Manhattan's south tip is layered in historic sites -- the chapel where George Washington used to pray, Wall Street, the resurrecting World Trade Center -- and the mix demonstrates that New York has always been able to reinvent itself.
"It's about time this site went back to the city and is not made a memorial site forever," Michael Arad, designer of the memorial, told AFP.
Chris Ward, executive director of the Port Authority, which owns the World Trade Center site, also says New York doesn't want nostalgia. "Soaring, beautiful office buildings -- that's what New York needs," he told a press conference.
That's happening now. But however much New York raises its head to the sky, that fateful earth below will always tug some back.
"This is all like sacred ground. People will be worshiping it," said Bob O'Brien, a janitor who has worked in the neighborhood for two decades and on 9/11 watched people jump from the doomed towers.
Looking at the snake-like tower one, he shrugged. "People don't care if it's up or not. They just want to come and see where it happened."