Miracle Workers

On Monday morning, Manhattan's financial district reopened for business. It was a remarkable scene for many reasons.

The blocks surrounding Wall Street looked as if they had been caught in some weird natural disaster. They had the feel of the capital of a developing country in political crisis. Police and military were everywhere, some in humvees with real guns on top. National Guardsmen checked IDs at barricades on Wall Street and Broad Street.

And there was the ash. Caked up on the streets, dusting the pastries in shop windows and the Mercedes abandoned in garages. And the smell. It was like smoke, but what else was in there? Plastic? Rubber? Jet fuel? Bodies? There was a scary sweetness to the odor, the strangeness of it even more striking when you went inside and then came back out again.

And then, there were the remnants of the towers themselves -- maybe 20 stories of steel-beam lattice, one corner still standing. It looked like a twisted, burned-out skeleton of a church steeple. Even having seen all the pictures, I gasped.

But, perhaps even more remarkable, was that so much still seemed to work. The New York Stock Exchange, after all, is just five blocks from the trade center. The disaster didn't just foul up the streets: Beyond the staggering human carnage, it uprooted businesses, destroyed phone and electricity connections, and disrupted major transportation arteries.

Could anyone have planned for such epic dislocation? Ivan Seidenberg, co-CEO of telecom giant Verizon, was speechless for a moment. "We never anticipated a bomb dropping here," he finally replied. Here are stories of how the financial district and the city returned, in less than a week's time, to some semblance of business normalcy.

(Re)Making a Market

Under the rumble of the elevated Queensboro subway, across from a taxi depot and a vacant office building, on an unremarkable block four miles and a river from the Trade Center, the cotton futures market is rocking.

Truly, it is loud. Men and women in cotton shirt-jackets shout bids at each other across the purple-carpeted pit, while dozens of monitors overhead stream prices. Volume is surprisingly heavy, given Tuesday's Jewish holiday. "It's been like this all day long," beams Mark Fichtel. It is, of course, exactly what a futures pit is supposed to be like.

Except it's in Queens.

At 8:48 AM on September 11, Fichtel looked out his window at the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) at 4 World Trade Center and saw flames explode from the north tower above him. Immediately, the chief executive ordered 750 traders and staff out of the building. "I'm a very cautious person," he says. A few hours later, the Board of Trade pits were destroyed.

Steve Bass knew exactly where to go. For the past five years, the NYBOT has spent $300,000 a year to lease and maintain backup pits and systems in the Queens building operated by Comdisco Inc., which provides disaster-recovery services. Some of the NYBOT's 1,200 members had opposed the expense. Now it seemed a brilliant stroke.

By midday on Tuesday, Bass, the NYBOT's senior vice president for information technology, had made it to the backup site. He couldn't reach his staff on the city's overwhelmed phone lines -- but by day's end, six colleagues, some of them traumatized by the tragedy, had joined him. Working through the night, the team and Comdisco staffers switched the backup systems on and pieced together the internal data network. The next morning, they arranged for a backup data system to replace the ticker stream normally provided by Global Crossing, whose own data center in lower Manhattan had been disabled. And over the next few days, the NYBOT rebuilt connections with the half of its member firms that had been displaced by the disaster.

On Saturday, most traders and the NYBOT staff traveled to Comdisco's site to test the new system. People were jubilant and teary to rediscover colleagues, alive. But "it was like the first day of school," says trader Roger Corrado. "Everyone walked in here, not knowing what to expect." In test after test, the systems worked -- until late in the afternoon, when traders were asked to pick up all the phones in the room at once. The system crashed. "My hair turned gray," Fichtel says. What initially seemed a crippling capacity shortage, however, turned out to be an easily fixed problem with a switch in the building.

For now, the NYBOT has crammed the activity that used to fill 13 pits into just 2. Trading sessions for most commodities have been condensed from four or five hours to one and a half. Everything works smoothly, but traders still feel disoriented. For 10 years, Jewel Ann Weiss stood at exactly the same spot in the same pit, trading cotton futures. "You get used to hearing the same people and the same voices around you," she says. In the new pit, the old order is tossed out. The old aural clues are useless. Trading is jerkier. "But we'll make the adjustment," Weiss says. "Humans do that."

Comdisco is providing space and services to 35 customers affected by the disaster -- 6 of them formerly housed in the towers. Not incidentally, Comdisco has been operating under bankruptcy protection since July. The disaster and stories like that of NYBOT could bring in new customers and needed revenues.