An early sign of the financial sector’s return to the ground zero area is the rising steel skeleton of Goldman Sachs’s new world headquarters, standing 12 stories above the ground less than two years after the company committed to the site.

The progress of the banking giant’s tower — slated to open in early 2010 — is in stark contrast to that of its long-delayed neighbor, the Freedom Tower. After years of waiting, construction is now under way, though work will be only below ground level until next year.

The new 42-story Goldman Sachs tower, in conjunction with developer Larry Silverstein’s 7 World Trade Center, is expected to bring a much-desired base of financial workers into an area that for nearly six years has known little but jackhammers, dump trucks, and the walled-off streets that surround the World Trade Center site.

By choosing a space just outside of ground zero, Goldman Sachs was able to steer clear of much public scrutiny and to zip past the frustrating tangle of bureaucracy that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Mr. Silverstein were forced to contend with. Goldman Sachs thus was able to design the skyscraper, receive approval, and hold a groundbreaking before the Port Authority had even finalized an agreement with Mr. Silverstein and the city for the Freedom Tower and Towers 2, 3, and 4 at ground zero. If its construction continues on schedule, the building will open at least two years before the completion of the Freedom Tower and three years before all four towers on the site are scheduled to open.

As the primary symbol for the rebuilding of ground zero, the Freedom Tower has been subject to far more public attention.

The slow pace and years-off completion date for the towers at ground zero has left many residents of the area frustrated and tired of the whole process.

“Development is taking place all over Lower Manhattan,” the chairwoman of the Battery Park City committee on Community Board 1, Linda Belfer, said. “The only place that nothing is happening is ground zero.”

Contributing to the delay at the $2.8 billion Freedom Tower was the exhaustive negotiations that took place between the Port Authority and Mr. Silverstein. They lasted for several months and didn’t let up until the middle of last year. Then, last year, the Freedom Tower’s design was scrapped amid security concerns, forcing architects to re-create the signature skyscraper with a more resistant base.

Since the Port Authority and Mr. Silverstein came to an agreement, the Port Authority contends that the site has seen significant progress. The agency has awarded $1.2 billion in contracts since September.

“Less than a year after that agreement, there’s been a tremendous amount of work done on the Trade Center site,” a spokesman for the Port Authority, Steven Coleman, said.

Concrete has been poured, and to date six towering steel beams can be seen towering up from the 70-foot-deep bathtub.

Not everything has gone perfectly at the Goldman Sachs site. There have been slight delays, and the company was initially aiming for occupancy in 2009. With a 12-story skeleton erected to date, the target for completion has been revised for the first few months of 2010.

Real estate experts and officials say Goldman Sachs’s presence is essential to priming the office market at the World Trade Center site, where the Port Authority and Mr. Silverstein will have millions of square feet to lease.

“Clearly there’s a synergistic economy at work,” Council Member Alan Gerson, who represents the area, said. “When you have a Goldman Sachs and a J.P. Morgan surrounding the site, you have other financial institutions, large, small, and mid-sized, that are going to want to be in the area — there’s no question about that.” Just recently, J.P. Morgan announced it would build a new investment banking headquarters at the former Deutsche Bank building at the southern end of ground zero.

When Goldman Sachs agreed to build on the Vesey Street and West Street site in 2005, the city, the state, and the real estate community hailed the decision as a much-needed vote of confidence for a struggling downtown that was still reeling from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The state and city enticed the corporation with a lucrative incentive package, offering an estimated $650 million in subsidies — prompting an outcry from critics of the deal.

Despite the pull of the incentives, Goldman Sachs’s decision to locate itself near the World Trade Center site is indicative of a broader shift of the financial sector within Lower Manhattan, real estate experts say. Should the new towers at ground zero be successful in attracting banking and finance giants, the northwest corner of Lower Manhattan will become a hub of global capital at a time when the area around Wall Street is converting hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space to residential use.

“The historic financial district is gradually — not so gradually — lifting away” from office development, the director of ground zero development at Silverstein Properties, John Lieber, said.

Silverstein Properties will own Towers 2, 3, and 4 at the World Trade Center site, which are scheduled to open in 2012 and 2013. The Freedom Tower is slated for completion in 2012.