New York has shown its best side in the aftermath of the catastrophe which hit the city on Tuesday.
The Wall Street Journal has won much praise for managing to publish every day this week. Staff were evacuated from its building in Liberty Street beside the World Trade Centre as debris was falling around them.
Journalists and editors were scattered and its computer production had to be recreated in satellite offices in New Jersey, 50 miles away. Its managing editor Mr Paul Steiger authorised a banner headline for the third time in the paper's history: "Terrorists destroy World Trade Centre, Hit Pentagon in Raid With Hijacked Jets". The other two occasions were Pearl Harbour and the Gulf War.
But the darker side emerged too. The mayor, Mr Rudolph Giuliani, told reporters yesterday that a bogus telemarketing company had been soliciting contributions from elderly people for the victims of the attack on the World Trade Centre.
"If they call you, call the police or the FBI, we will go out and arrest them," he said.
Two looters dressed as rescue workers had also managed to penetrate the closed area below 14th street on Thursday and steal watches worth £3,000.
But most serious of all, a woman posing as a medical worker had approached rescue workers in agitation to say her husband, a Port Authority policeman, had called her on a mobile phone from beneath the rubble, where he was with nine other survivors.
Rescue workers frantically dug at the spot but it was a cruel hoax; there was no call, no police officer, and the woman is now under arrest on charges of reckless endangerment.
Torrential rain and lightening during the night hampered the rescue effort, with rainwater weighing down weakened structures.
Battery Park City remained closed to residents yesterday. The Holland Tunnel to New Jersey is also closed and the Staten Island ferry will not resume until Monday.
More stories emerged yesterday of the immediate aftermath of the attack. Incredibly, Morgan Stanley Dean Wittter, the largest tenant of the World Trade Centre, managed to account for most of its 2,700 workers located between floors 54 and 57, the second tower to be hit.
Only 15 employees of the securities firm were still missing, one of them a security guard who returned to make sure everyone had got out safely.