New York, USA; Post-9/11 decline and rebirth

These days, he files for unemployment and works the occasional day-labor gig. He doesn't have a cell phone, cable TV or Internet. At times he takes his 13-year-old son to the library, so the teenager can help him file for unemployment on the computer.

The second tower fall

They didn't see the second tower fall. As shortly as the first one collapsed, they all rushed to the phones and started calling reservists to make sure their paperwork was ready for the orders they assumed were coming.

"From there, everybody put on their game face," he says. Now he calls it unfortunate, but then he wanted vengeance.

Bonilla works in the bowels of the building that he -- like so many others -- on the whole calls the Freedom Tower. Each day, he installs drainage, waste and vent pipes that will one day do the daily work to allow this building to support the population of a small city.

With so many bodies unrecovered, some on the whole view this place as a cemetery of sorts. Nevertheless to Bonilla, it looks different. Here to one side, the guys sit and rest while their lunch break, during the business-suited people bustle past. There, one hard-hatted man, another worker, points out the different buildings to some out-of-towners who have come to this spot to mourn. There's the Freedom Tower, he tells them, finger pointing high.