New York struggles to get back to business

NEW YORK -- The air thick with dust and tinged with bitter smoke, a city still patching together phone lines and electricity battled to get back to business for today's reopening of Wall Street.

The New York Stock Exchange and the Mercantile Exchange, as well as City Hall and other government buildings and courthouses, are to reopen today, even as much of lower Manhattan remains inaccessible.

"We think we're ready for it," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Sunday. "Some of it obviously ... is trial and error." Investors anxiously awaited the markets' reopening.

Five days after two hijacked commercial jetliners brought down the World Trade Center, parts of the island's southern tip are still without electricity or telephone service. Streets are crisscrossed with heavy utility cables and portable generators stand on sidewalks.

The Wall Street subway station is closed, and only subways on the east side of downtown Manhattan will run at all. A new ferry service will carry passengers across the East River from Brooklyn. Streets are closed to vehicles and some thoroughfares are blocked altogether.

Even so, Giuliani has made reopening the area -- home to the city's financial and government sectors -- a priority. The New York Stock Exchange had a successful test Saturday of its computer and communications systems.

The computerized Nasdaq Stock Market, which doesn't have a trading floor as the NYSE does on Wall Street, said it had also conducted a successful test of its systems.

"The life of the city goes on, and I encourage people to go about they're lives," said Giuliani. "One of the best things they can do to show how strong they are, and to show how terrorists can't cower us, is to not be cowered."

Not physically damaged

President Bush also weighed in, saying Sunday: "People will be amazed at how quickly we will rebuild New York."

The NYSE was not physically damaged in the attack. But a telephone switching operation was knocked out, severing some of the communications systems used in trading. A number of investment firms suffered damage that forced them to relocate some of their operations and re-establish computer links.

About $100 billion worth of trades are conducted every day in the United States, bringing the estimated losses from the shutdown to $400 billion, according to the Securities Industry Association. Investment firms suffered many millions of dollars more in damage.

Though bonds and some commodities resumed trading Thursday, this has been the stock market's longest closure since the midst of the Depression in 1933, when the government declared a banking holiday that lasted for more than a week.

Business owners and residents are concerned that the tens of thousands of people returning to work could create chaos in a fragile situation.

"I don't know how much this place can take," said Elizabeth Hart, who lives on John Street, three blocks from where the World Trade Center stood. "There's no power, it smells bad. The last thing we need is crowds going to work down here."