WERE ALL the construction workers, engineers and architects in New York wiped out on 9/11? The question occurred to me while standing at Ground Zero with the other tourists, gawping into the gap where the twin towers used to be as if it were one of the man-made wonders of the world. There seems no other rational reason why, as the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks nears, there should still be a huge hole in the heart of Lower Manhattan.

It took New Yorkers little more than a year to build the Empire State Building. Within four years of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the USA had built the Bomb and won the war. Yet at Ground Zero, there has been almost zero progress on the ground through a sorry saga of political and emotional interference by everybody from elected officials to victims’ relatives groups.

At the risk of being told to mind my own Brit-ness, here is a friendly suggestion to speed things up. Forget about treating the site as “sacred ground”. On that basis half of London would have been left as a bombsite with a plaque after the Blitz. We always build the future on the remains of the past. And don’t allow anybody to veto progress by invoking the names of the dead. Despite what it says at Ground Zero, the 3,000 killed were not all “the heroes of 9/11”. Most were simply innocent victims who should be remembered, but not revered.

On the plane to the US, I read an article in New York magazine describing the five years since 9/11 as “the long funeral”. At the end of it, New York is still left with a huge open grave. To mark the fifth anniversary the Memorial Foundation has launched a fundraising campaign under the slogan “It’s time”. It is indeed — time to move on. What New York surely needs is working buildings. And what the world needs from New York is another display of the energy and ambition that made the Manhattan skyline the symbol of modernity.

I was gobsmacked to hear this week of a crew in space suits working in a sealed bubble at the New York Historical Society. They are mounting an exhibition recreating a storefront from close to the twin towers, using the original jeans and T-shirts covered with dust from 9/11 — dust described not just as toxic, but “historic, and possibly sacred”.

Who wants to think of dead dust in a time capsule as a symbol of the city that never sleeps? Give me the American attitude preserved in an old New York tune:

Nothing’s impossible I have found,
For when my chin is on the ground,
I pick myself up,
Dust myself off,
Start all over again . . .”

• THE GRANNIES Against the War protesting on Fifth Avenue had more in common than one mght have supposed with the members of the Catholic War Veterans’ club in Connecticut, whom I visited for a drink. They told me that President Bush was “the worst guy we ever had . . . don’t get me started”.

  My eye was taken by a wall poster bearing a distinctive militarised version of the US constitution: “Life, Liberty — and the Pursuit of All who Threaten it”. Unlike their UK counterparts, the vets have successfully defended the liberty to smoke in their own private club against bans imposed by the authorities at home.

• EVEN on holiday it is hard to get away from the “War on Terror”. Heathrow security guards left off scanning young Asian men long enough to confiscate my wife’s make-up. Thus the world was saved from the prospect of a mascara massacre.

  In America, I have been studying a detailed article about the alleged British bomb plot — an article denied to you at home. The New York Times blocked online access for UK readers, for fear that it might infringe our contempt laws. While the US media is free to discuss evidence before and during a trial, the assumption in the UK seems to be that potential jurors cannot be trusted to hear about a case unless we are guided by m’learned friends and m’lud.

  This seems less about contempt of court than contempt for the public. Must we really be protected from words about bomb plots as well as bombs? I shall bring the dangerous article home — if I can get it through airport security.

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