What does one do with sixteen empty acres in America's emotional capital? Is tourism here voyeurism or bearing witness (or a little bit of both)? Countless questions remain about Lower Manhattan, but one thing is clear: There is more to see and do here than ever before. Paul Goldberger steps out on the town

When you walk around Lower Manhattan today, you either move toward Ground Zero, compelled by the magnetic pull of its symbolism, or you circle around it. Now that a year has passed since the World Trade Center was destroyed, no one is shocked to find this huge empty space in the center of one of the busiest business districts in the world. But the sheer size of it—sixteen acres breaking out of a dense web of narrow streets—still astonishes. Because you cannot enter Ground Zero or move across it, you cannot really ignore it, even if you try. It is the enormous void in the middle of everything.

The arduous, heartrending work of removing debris and searching for human remains was completed at the end of May, three months ahead of schedule, and now Ground Zero looks more like a vast construction site than a disaster area. This isn't likely to make it any less a place of pilgrimage. Lower Manhattan has always had its share of tourists, although they have tended to see it less as a destination in itself than as a jumping-off point for other places: It is where you board the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and where 26,000 people a day once rode the elevators to the observation deck at the top of the World Trade Center. Now, one of the least expected effects of September 11 is that this disjointed area feels much more like a unified whole. The different neighborhoods on each side of the site share a sense of mourning, but it is more than that. Because you can't get to the center of Ground Zero, people move around it. They walk down Broadway and over to Church Street, and they look at it from Greenwich Street and from Liberty Street. The desire to get close to Ground Zero has forced people onto the sidewalks of Lower Manhattan, and that changes everything about how they experience the neighborhood.

All of Lower Manhattan has been reshaped by the events of September 11, and everyone who comes to this part of the city, whether to pay respects at Ground Zero or not, comes with the catastrophic destruction of the World Trade Center in mind. St. Paul's Chapel, on Broadway between Fulton and Vesey streets, which dates from 1766, was once known as the place where George Washington worshiped; now it has become the place where rescue workers found refuge and were fed and cared for. Visitors from around the world first posted their spontaneous tributes on the iron fence around the chapel, and the fence remains a kind of tourist attraction in itself—adorned with posters, banners, flags, and testaments of support for New York and gratitude to the rescue workers. There is an earnestness to these homemade objects that seems out of place amid the pressured madness of the financial district; you do not have to know the area well to guess that this is the sort of place where most people wouldn't have deigned to pay attention to handwritten posters from high schools in Kansas before September 11, let alone given them pride of place in front of the city's oldest and most venerable church. Next door to St. Paul's Chapel, at the intersection of Church and Fulton streets, was the wooden ramp that led from Broadway to the temporary viewing platform erected a couple of months after September 11, to allow visitors to at least get a little closer to Ground Zero than they could have otherwise. The platform was not without controversy, and the division of opinion surrounding it seemed a metaphor for the conflicting feelings about the very idea of tourism here. To some, creating an actual destination for the pilgrims seemed to encourage voyeurism; to others, it seemed to confer a kind of dignity to the act of bearing witness. In fact, it did both.