Yes, Wall Street died. But it is also being reborn.

Everybody knows when Wall Street died. It was four months ago, the day that the government let grand old Lehman go bankrupt. Or maybe three days later, when once august Morgan Stanley started looking around for someone to pair up with so desperately that you'd have thought it was prom night at the trailer park. Or perhaps a month after that, when the folks at Goldman Sachs decided they might need to take the government's money after all.

All important dates—for, no doubt, Wall Street has died a dozen deaths in the last months, and nobody goes through all that without coming out battered and worn. It's still too early, after all those funerals, to say that Wall Street has been reborn. But less than six months after it seemed so clear to so many that we would never have Wall Street to kick around anymore, there are signs that the zombie is climbing out of the grave with surprising energy.

In the first weeks of the financial crisis, Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. disappeared overnight. Morgan Stanley let it be known that it was looking for a buyer so urgently that it was negotiating with a bank that was itself on the brink of insolvency (the now defunct Wachovia). Merrill Lynch's CEO, John Thain, was seen as a magician for somehow navigating Merrill into the arms of Bank of America. Goldman Sachs, by far the strongest of the independent investment houses, was supposedly resigning itself to a future that was "smaller, less profitable, and far less lucrative for its workers." New York magazine explained that "Wall Street had to die," and Time bid it good riddance with a cover about how Wall Street sold out America.

So look at what is happening now: Morgan Stanley has somehow survived and is indeed in the midst of finalizing a merger—a deal in which Morgan is buying Citigroup's Smith Barney to create the biggest brokerage in the country. Bank of America's deal to buy Merrill (for which B of A has had to beg the government for cash) seems to be merely bringing us closer to the day when Bank of America itself gets dismantled and split right back into its constituent parts. And while nobody is exactly popping Champagne at Goldman—which announced its first quarterly loss since going public in 1999—it has already rejiggered its stock grants to make sure that even in these awful times it can remain surprisingly lucrative for its employees.

It's looking, in short, like when all is said and done, we'll still have Wall Street to kick around and get kicked around by. So what happened? Think of it as one of the truly great tricks of Wall Street: More than any other industry, Wall Street, an institution built largely on the connections of a small number of very highly paid people, has always had an almost magical ability to reconstitute itself.

"Wall Street as we know it" has ended more than once before. It ended in 1933, when the government took apart JP Morgan and passed the Glass-Steagall Act to keep commercial banks out of the business of selling stocks and bonds and assure that nobody would again have the House of Morgan's hold on the U.S. financial markets. It ended after the 1987 crash and the great junk bond fiasco, when Lehman Bros. (an earlier model of the Lehman Bros. that failed last year) blew up, Salomon Bros. withered, and Drexel Burnham Lambert went bankrupt. And it was widely assumed to be dying a rapid death after the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act let the megabanks—Chase, Citi, and Bank of America—get into investment banking, a change that was supposed to mean that the independent Wall Street houses would be bought up or stomped out of existence.