The fleet of television vans bedecked with satellite dishes and antennas has zoomed off to some other newsworthy catastrophe. The makeshift tent city, where begrimed firefighters ate their meals, drank coffee and received massages for their aching muscles and counseling for their aching hearts, has disappeared as quickly as it sprang up, like Brigadoon. The building itself, the smoking brick citadel that was the focus of the city's and the nation's attention for the eight days during which it grudgingly yielded up the dead, is all but razed. About 30 feet of the wall on the Grafton Street side remains, along with the superstructure of a loading dock area. The neighborhood is noisy again.
Cars throb at the intersection, waiting for lights to change.
The elevated expressway, which was shut down for a period so that fire trucks could pour cascades of water into the building, rumbles overhead. Twelve weeks have passed since the fire, but when the day warms up a little toward noon, there is still the whiff of smoke in the air, a ghost of those flames of December. Nicholas DiLiddo has been at the building since the day after the fire. He and his demolition crew operated much of the equipment that picked away at the structure as firefighters clambered over the rubble. Mr. DiLiddo has been in the demolition business all his adult life, and when he looks at a building he tends to wonder how hard a job it would be to bring it down.