Almost a year later, two weeks before the anniversary, Scharf, May, and Preziosi tell their stories separately, each focusing on something different about their survival and the rebuilding of their lives and livelihoods. Their reactions in the intervening months have run the gamut from determination to depression, from struggle to resolve.

Crazy quilt: a sample of memorial art Altman observed on anniversary walkabout photo: Greg Altman '95

The offices of Euro Brokers are now on the sixteenth floor of One New York Plaza, a relatively small skyscraper just at the southern tip of the island, next to the ferry docks on the East River. Computers crowd desks that crowd aisles that are filled with traders, sitting and standing, on the phones, on the computers, making trades and transactions. The atmosphere is noisy and energetic, the large rooms filled with light. One would never suspect what has brought the firm to this point.

Scharf sits in his office, door open to the trading floor, windows behind him overlooking the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. He is quiet as he tells the story, pausing at times to collect his thoughts or emotions, acknowledging his own "saving grace" of being in London while honoring the memories of the dead and the difficulties of the survivors.

Being in London, he says, "gave us a base of operations that we wouldn't have had immediately in New York. We had a firm meeting, and then, that night, we started making calls." The London offices had copies of employee lists, and Scharf and his team were able to make a start at finding out who had survived and who had not. "We tried to patch things together. After the first twenty-four hours, we thought we had lost eighty people." As more people were able to communicate, that number decreased, and by the time Scharf was able to return to New York on Friday, the firm knew it had lost sixty-one.

This was the biggest loss, the most irreplaceable, and next to it, Scharf doesn't dwell on the loss of infrastructure and records. Instead, he speaks of making decisions that would keep his company together. Even while in London, for instance, he had a business acquaintance call him to offer office space--this space in which the offices are housed. A skyscraper. In the city. Downtown.

" You had all sorts of reactions, obviously," Scharf says. "Some people didn't want to come to New York City. Some people certainly didn't want to be downtown. Other people didn't want to be above the second story. All understandable." But it was the only offer Scharf had that didn't split up his employees among several different sites.

Creation from destruction: a tile project in a Manhattan neighborhood photo: Greg Altman '95

"This company is very family-oriented," he says. "We're pretty close. And I felt very strongly that we really needed to be together as a firm in one location. If we were to splinter, we'd never recover." So he held a managers' meeting, there at One New York Plaza, giving his team an opportunity to reconnect with one another, to walk around the space and get a feel for it, to hear him make the case for keeping the company intact. It was September 16.

" We had to act. If you didn't act, the fragility of people on their own would have worsened." He acknowledges that One New York Plaza "wasn't a perfect solution," but it was the solution that would bring people back together, helping both the employees and the firm get back on their feet. At a firm-wide meeting the next day at a midtown hotel, he gave people the opportunity to spend time together, to "mingle and hug and cry," and after he presented the office- space plan, gave them time to react.

Euro Brokers would continue to give its employees time. Scharf recalls some of what he said at that meeting. "'Beginning tomorrow,' I said, 'I'm going to be there. If you can't make it tomorrow, that's fine. If you can't make it next week, that's fine, too. If it takes you a month, it doesn't matter. But I'm going to be down there, and we're going to be setting up, and we're going to be open tomorrow.' And we came in here the next day, and we were all out on the floor, and we probably had 60 percent attendance."

Preziosi had actually returned to work on Friday the fourteenth, at a small Euro Brokers office in Parsippany, New Jersey. "I was never there before," she says. "Once we got to the office, I had to hug everyone there." A co-worker told her that the body of a friend had been found, news that "just made it all too real" and made work difficult that day.

When the offices at One New York Plaza opened, Preziosi changed her commute from the bus--which couldn't get through the roadblocks that had shut down lower Manhattan--to the ferry. "I cried as we stood on line on the dock, looking at the New York skyline," she says. "The towers were gone, smoke still coming up where they once stood, and I wanted so to go back to my old office." Having inhaled a large amount of dust on the eleventh, she wore a respirator as she walked through the downtown streets.

Getting back to work, she says, kept her mind busy. "The disaster recovery process started at the software and hardware levels, which included my staff and the hardware and networking staff and the communications people. We worked long extra hours getting the systems back together and running for the brokers to be able to return to work."

By the end of that week, Scharf says, more than 90 percent of his employees were coming in. The next hurdle, which Preziosi and her co-workers were overcoming, was infrastructure. "We had forty dial-up lines," Scharf says, comparing that to the 2,000 direct lines that the firm had had at the Trade Center. "We didn't have any direct lines, we were getting our infrastructure back, our software back--but we started doing business." He gives the credit to his employees, the managers and traders who "stepped up." "Everyone was very determined and committed. We were committed to rebuilding--we had responsibilities to the survivors, we had responsibilities to the families, we had responsibilities to the company as a whole, and there was no way we were just going to fold our tent."

" We did this to feel useful--like this would not defeat us," Preziosi says. "This is what our lost friends would want us to do. It was also helpful to be with people who went through it, because if you did not live it, you really have no idea what it means to run for your life."

Owen May's employees were going through similar stresses. He, too, had a friend who called in the days immediately following the attacks to offer workspace. It was also downtown, at 120 Broadway, a difficult location behind the barricades and near enough to the World Trade Center site that it is visible from the building, "right there in the thick of things." He says the firm was trying to come to terms with the trauma and the loss of head trader Harry Ramos, and trying to get back to work.

" For certain people, it was hard, emotionally, to get back into the game," he says. "Some people couldn't leave their house. Some people were suffering traumatic stress already. And I didn't want to disrupt anybody's grief, make it harder on them."

Added to the emotional toll was the loss of every record the company had. Housed in Tower One, the May Davis Group archived its back-up records in Tower Two, off-site but near at hand. The offices of the firm's attorneys were in the towers. Even the records from the firm's Baltimore office were in New York that day, on-site in preparation for an audit. With only the personal records of a few employees available to them, May Davis was starting from scratch.

" People would come up to me and say, 'Owen, you have the most difficult task in the world.' But I built the company with a business plan, and if I didn't learn anything the first time around?" He shakes his head and laughs once, letting that rhetorical question trail off before returning to the "how" of rebuilding at 120 Broadway.

" We've got one phone line," he says. "Chase Plaza was right there, and I spotted an outlet, and they had chairs, and I would sit out there with all my paperwork and plug in my cell phone and set up my laptop, and I'd have an office. Those were the kinds of things that we had to do."

While some employees were dealing with severe emotional trauma, he says, those who were able to return to work did so with the attitude that the firm wouldn't be defeated. "We fought so hard until September 10 to keep it alive," he says, recalling the company's earlier struggle. "Everybody started to chip in and do what they needed to do, in one effort. 'I'll take care of this.' 'Okay, I'll take care of that.' 'I'm going to call these people.' And I had all my friends, all my friends called me up. My friends from Duke would take time off from work to help us put things together."

In April, representatives from the recovery crews at the World Trade Center site arrived at the office. May was in London that day, and so he missed the delivery of the plaque that had graced the company's front door on the eighty-seventh floor. "It was emotional for everybody," he says. "They said, this is one of the few things that survived out of any firm. They found it at the bottom of the rubble."