If the winds are forgiving enough over Lower Manhattan — up where workers can see the whole outline of the island’s tip — a steel column will be hoisted into place Monday afternoon atop the exoskeleton of 1 World Trade Center and New York will have a new tallest building.


More important, downtown will have reclaimed its pole star.


Poking into the sky, the first column of the 100th floor of 1 World Trade Center will bring the tower to a height of 1,271 feet, making it 21 feet higher than the Empire State Building.


After several notorious false starts, a skyscraper has finally taken form at ground zero. At first, its twin cranes could be detected creeping over the jumbled tops of nearby towers. Then, at the rate of a new floor every week, it began reshaping the Manhattan skyline as seen from New Jersey. By late last fall, it could be spotted from the control tower at La Guardia Airport, eight and a half miles away.


A tower has again become an inescapable presence at the southern end of Manhattan.


The author Neal Bascomb, who drives into New York every few weeks from Philadelphia, where he lives, recalled a growing awareness that 1 World Trade Center was visible from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and that it was ratcheting perceptibly taller on each visit. “You know, I was happy to see it,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wonderful.’ ”


From a construction point of view, the completion of the framework, known as the topping out, will be a more significant milestone. That is to occur in a couple of months, when 1 World Trade Center reaches 1,368 feet at its rooftop parapet, identical in height to the first 1 World Trade Center, which was destroyed, with the rest of the complex, in the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001. The ultimate topping out will be the completion next year of an antenna that will bring the structure’s overall height to 1,776 feet.


Yet there is an excitement to this moment that was conveyed by Patrick J. Foye, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is one of the developers of 1 World Trade Center.


“You’ve got floor-to-ceiling views in every direction,” he said in an interview last week. “If you strain your neck and look carefully enough, to the west you can see Alaska.”


Not Russia? “Not quite yet,” he said. “Maybe when we get to the observation deck.”


This is the second time a skyscraper called 1 World Trade Center has edged over the Empire State Building. The first was on Oct. 19, 1970, when a section of steel framework elevated the north tower of the trade center to 1,254 feet, four feet above Empire State’s 1,250-foot benchmark.


The first trade center was seen as a threat to the real estate market. Owners and builders fought it fiercely. Their ranks included Lawrence A. Wien, who controlled the Empire State Building, and Seymour Durst, who headed the Durst Organization and whose son Douglas is developing 1 World Trade Center. On May 2, 1968, a committee headed by Mr. Wien took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times showing the silhouette of a jetliner headed straight for the upper floors of 1 World Trade Center. The problem, the ad averred, was air traffic, not terrorists. But the it said presciently, “The total potential hazard is staggering.”


By contrast, the current management of the Empire State Building released this statement about the new 1 World Trade Center: “The world’s most famous office building, the ancestor of all super-tall towers, welcomes our newer, taller cousin to the skyline. We’ve watched you grow, and now we salute you.” What they are really thinking at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street is impossible to discern since the building’s public relations firm, Edelman, declined to answer questions and ruled out interviews with Peter L. Malkin and Anthony E. Malkin, the key owners.


Mr. Bascomb’s 2003 book, “Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City,” chronicled the contest in 1929 between the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street to be the tallest building in the world, a contest Chrysler won, only to be quickly overshadowed by the Empire State Building. There is no exhilarating race now, he said.


“This is not really a victory of any sort or even necessarily something to be celebrated,” Mr. Bascomb said about 1 World Trade Center overtopping the Empire State Building. “It’s kind of like competing against a ghost.”