By early afternoon, firefighters retreated from the rubble-strewn site of a Salvation Army thrift shop on South 22nd Street that was crushed by the wall of an adjacent building on Market Street that fell during demolition on Wednesday morning.
But judging by the pessimism of the architecture students, history buffs and ordinary Beijingers who made a pilgrimage to the rubble-strewn site last week, there is little reason to expect any change in the status quo.
Everyone has focused, understandably, on the heroics of the fire and rescue crews sifting through the rubble at the site of the attack.
The cause of the blast, in a Minneapolis suburb, was not yet known as emergency workers used a bucket brigade to clear rubble from the site.
All of this is made more difficult by the amount of rubble at the site, Professor Oxley said, noting that photographs posted online showed a tangle of concrete, wires and collapsed floors.
When I visited Plano in March and walked amid the construction rubble at the site of Melissa and Gerry Owen's future coffee shop, it was easy to see ideas they took from their New Haven residency.
Seven days after the disaster, contractors clearing rubble at the site said they had yet to reach even the area where the twin towers had stood, except occasionally with the aid of mechanical talons at the ends of huge cranes.
What makes Dr. Gilgoff's assumption somewhat unusual is that his office, on 118th Street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues, is almost eight miles from the rubble at the site now called ground zero.
Still, search-and-rescue teams, some using dogs to carry infrared cameras into small air pockets, continued probing into the uneven hills of rubble at the site yesterday, but had little success in finding bodies, alive or dead.
Instead of seeing the World Trade Center to the north, they see a view that contains the last bits of rubble from the site, an amount that shrinks daily.
