As a morning fog spread on Thursday from the New York Harbor to the site, only a few blocks north, known as Ground Zero, the city hit last Sept. 11 prepared to mark the end of the World Trade Center recovery effort -- three months ahead of schedule -- and a new beginning for the site where thousands perished on that fateful day. Almost 1,800 of the 2,823 victims have yet to be identified, news reports note. A ceremony was set to begin at 10:29 a.m., the time that the second tower collapsed. "We cannot forget why we are here. Twenty-eight hundred people gave their lives in the name of freedom," Mayor Michael Bloomberg told Katie Couric on Thursday's "Today" show, which split its broadcast between its Rockefeller Center studio and a platform at Ground Zero. (The PEOPLE.com Daily is being written some 30 stories above the site, in a building only three blocks away from where Tower Two stood. All car traffic in the area has been halted.) The ceremony is set to include the tolling of a firehouse bell in four sets of five chimes each (the traditional firehouse code for a fallen firefighter), an empty stretcher carrying an American flag (symbolizing those killed but not found) and the mournful skirl of bagpipes, reports Reuters. On Tuesday night of this week, the final steel girder standing -- known as the Stars and Stripes beam -- was cut down in a moving ceremony, with recovery workers scrawling messages on it and some touching it, as if it were a coffin. The girder had stood at what was the lowest level of the south tower's sub-basement. The cleanup cost $7 billion and was under budget, "Today" reported. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani said on the program that the effort was carried out with dignity. "I never told anybody to work any faster," he said.