"You would see people every day at the deli counter and you don't know what happened and where these people are. You just don't know," she said in a recent interview. Ms. Martin, general counsel at RBC Dominion Securities Corp.'s U.S. operations, was among the first group of six employees to return to the firm's offices directly across the street from the disaster site in early January after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

From her second-floor office in One Liberty Plaza, she could look out onto the twisted steel remains of the 110-storey twin towers that had graced New York's skyline for 30 years and rescue workers sifting through the rubble. Drivers in giant diesel excavators on the street below were eye level with her. When she worked into the evening, klieg lights at ground zero transformed night into day.

By mid-March, all of RBC's 500 employees in New York were back in the 54-storey tower, one of 23 buildings damaged in the attacks. Working next door to the scene of the crime has not been easy.

One year after the horrific events of Sept. 11, ground zero looks like an open wound. The skeletal remnants of the World Trade Center towers are gone, along with the fires that smouldered for months.

Fresh concrete spanning the width of the site has been poured to rebuild the destroyed commuter line linking Lower Manhattan to New Jersey.

But just south of ground zero, many of the delis and pizza parlours that once lined Liberty Street are gone. In their place, hundreds of tourists descend daily on the public viewing area erected on Liberty, alongside the entrepreneurs hawking Sept. 11 keepsakes.

"No one really wanted to come back down here, but I think most people understood that it made the most sense for the business," Mark Standish, RBC's head of global financial products, said in a recent interview. He returned to Liberty Plaza in January after working for 3½ months out of a makeshift office in a Lincoln Town Car.

In the buildup to today's grim anniversary, everyone is feeling more on edge, say several executives at Canadian banks who were among the Wall Street refugees. This is what the experts call the anniversary reaction, the flashbacks, anxiety, fear and pain triggered by the commemorative ceremonies and unrelenting media coverage.

RBC, a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada, was one of three Canadian banks with major operations on Wall Street last Sept. 11. Bank of Nova Scotia's 400 employees began returning to One Liberty Plaza in April. CIBC World Markets Inc., the investment banking arm of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, has not moved back -- it has relocated 2,000 employees from One World Financial Center to offices in midtown Manhattan.

All of the Canadian banks' employees were safely evacuated last September. They were among the men and women who worked around the clock to restore their firms' operations in the weeks following the attacks. Technical wizards got the computer systems up and running in temporary offices. Employees doubled up in offices and worked in shifts.

Many of them said the sense of mission kept them going in the initial months following the attacks. It was only after they achieved the monumental task of rebuilding their business that the enormity of the tragedy hit them.

"We didn't know what else to do, and the harder we worked and the less we thought about the consequences of everything, the easier it was going to be for us to get over it," said John Hellier, head of U.S. equities at CIBC World Markets.
How the banks' employees are coping in the wake of Sept. 11 depends in part on their proximity to ground zero. RBC has its offices on the second through fifth floors of One Liberty. The building's lower floors sustained much more damage in the attacks than the upper floors. Scotiabank's offices are on the 23rd through 26th floors. RBC was also one of the first tenants to begin moving back in January, when One Liberty was still eerily quiet. By the time Scotiabank started moving back in April, many other tenants had returned. As for CIBC, it is nowhere near the site.

For RBC employees, the single biggest fear was the air quality in and around One Liberty. When they first moved in, computers and other plastic objects were burning in the pit just across the street. Mercury, dioxins and asbestos had blown in through the building's shattered windows, along with the ash and debris. RBC made exhaustive efforts to test contaminant levels in the air and clean its offices, said Paul Gottlieb, chief operating officer of RBC DS's New York operations. The timing of the company's return was dictated by the environmental issues.

"We subjected the space to the strictest levels of scrutiny that existed. Until we could declare the building safe, there was no way we were going to go back in," he said.

RBC stripped out carpets, ceiling tiles and upholstered furniture. Computers were taken apart and cleaned. And every drawer on the fourth and fifth floors had its contents emptied and dusted.

There were no problems reported by the first group of employees that returned in January. But when the second group came back to the trading floor a few weeks later, many traders complained of itchy eyes and sore throats.

After more testing, the environmental experts found that dust particles and air were seeping in through gaps in the windows and the building's frame, where some of the insulation had corroded.

Brookfield Properties Corp., the Toronto company that owns One Liberty, addressed the problem by tightening seals around the windows and installing new air filters.

Brookfield had reopened One Liberty on Oct. 24 after declaring that the air quality in the building "meets or exceeds all standards." That was well before major tenants were ready to return. Both RBC and Scotiabank informed Brookfield that they were not moving back until their environmental experts said it was safe to do so.

Kevin Ray, executive managing director of Scotiabank's U.S. operations, said that by the time employees moved back, they were comfortable they weren't taking any health risks. "We didn't force the issue and push people in early in the process," he added.

RBC's proximity to the street also left employees within earshot of rumbling noises at ground zero and the loading bay in the basement that sound just like when the first plane hit the World Trade Center's north tower. When workers heard the noises during the first few weeks back, the occasional scream would pierce the trading floor.

Some employees have taken out their frustrations on their boss. Gavin Ezekowitz, head of U.S. equity sales at RBC, said many of the 35 traders who report to him lash out more often.
RBC employees are relieved to be together again under one roof. RBC had fanned out to 11 different offices after Sept. 11. Mr. Gottlieb, who had joined RBC from UBS Warburg only five weeks before Sept. 11 and who was still getting to know employees, hit the phones that day helping to track down workers -- everyone was accounted for by the next day. Mr. Standish and seven others made the six-hour trek by foot to Long Island City near Queen's to activate the business recovery site.

Mr. Standish has noticed that employees no longer stick around the office if they don't need to be there. "We're all now trying to steal that slack afternoon to get out of here," he said.

He also travels as though he's going to get stranded somewhere -- with three phone batteries, a fully charged BlackBerry and plenty of cash in U.S. and Canadian dollars and British pounds.

As for Ms. Martin, the RBC general counsel, she had grown accustomed to looking at the twin towers during her two-decade career on Wall Street. Now, she has a panoramic view of the Hudson River from her picture window. "For 20 years of my life, I've not been able to look straight through to the water."