Hours of 9/11 Never Seen Footage Donated to New York Public Library

Harry Siegel

New York Daily News

(TNS)

That “never forget” admonition after 9/11 contains within itself the concession that, over time, things are forgotten.

The 9/11 Memorial & Museum are meant to be a collective bulwark against that, with upkeep on the free memorial at Ground Zero that opened in 2011 paid for in large part by $33 general admission tickets, discounted to $16 for FDNY, NYPD and PAPD officers, for the museum that opened in 2014.

The museum is, understandably, not a place many New Yorkers have visited more than once, if that.

It’s also the home of artifacts including roughly 500 hours of gripping, mostly amateur videos of that devastating day and its immediate aftermath that were compiled at the time by husband and wife filmmakers Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder.

The couple donated the non-commercial rights to their collection to the museum — making them its largest donor of moving media — in exchange for access to shoot what eventually became their quite critical 2021 documentary about the making of the museum, “The Outsider”—with the expectation that their collection would serve as a public resource and historical record.

The footage they’d compiled in 2001, of what was then likely the most recorded event in human history, includes things like a riveting 20-minute clip of New Yorkers gathered around televisions, taking in and talking about the attack as it unfolded in a potent mix of the panicked and the pedestrian.

But the footage, while compelling, hasn’t been easy to access, presumably because the young museum hasn’t found the resources to catalog it, an expensive task that demands time and care. People who’ve asked to see those videos have been referred back to the couple’s company, The CameraPlanet Archive.

“Part of being an archivist is being in the right place at the right time and having the good sense not to throw it away,” Rosenbaum told me in a phone conversation this week where he broke the news that The CameraPlanet Archive is now in serious talks with the New York Public Library about also giving them non-commercial rights to the collection, along with the museum, so that the recordings can finally be easily and widely seen.

And that, Rosenbaum said, is important because “somebody may see something in those images that I don’t see.” The couple hasn’t posted their collection online themselves, he explained, because they’re reluctant to post them on an ad-driven platform like YouTube, and because “the sheer volume means it needs to be carefully cataloged.”

If and when a deal is finalized with the public library that was founded in 1895, he added, they can be confident that, in a world of disappearing data, the archive will “remain a public resource for generations to come.”

A NYPL spokesperson said that they don’t comment on or discuss details about potential acquisitions before deals are finalized. ”The thing about 9/11 is that you can draw a circle around it,” Tom Hennes, who’d served as the museum’s lead exhibition designer, told me in 2021 while discussing his frustrations with and aspirations for the institution.

“You can’t draw a circle around Afghanistan or Iraq and the injuries and trauma that have come out of America’s reaction to it, but you can draw a circle around the date.”

But drawing that circle, he said, is precisely how you end up with a limited and confining account that feels cut off from the present.

“It’s about trusting the people who come to see it,” he said. “It’s about letting go a bit of the need to control the narrative.”

The NYPL — or another institution if that deal somehow goes sideways — making these archives easily and entirely accessible to the public will be a real step toward that.

“This isn’t about our generation or the next generation,” Yoder said when we spoke in 2021 about the couple’s documentary on the 9/11 Museum and their videos of 9/11 itself.

“We really have framed this in terms of our children’s children and beyond. When you think about someone who’s under the age of 20, you know, they weren’t there that day.”

She asked: “Most of us probably remember, but what is the relevance of this to them?”

And answered: “It’s like, you know, old history even though to me it seems like yesterday.”

For the New Yorkers who were there, Rosenbaum added, speaking just after America’s humbling exit from Afghanistan returned power there to the Taliban, “it’s time for us to own it and be critical of it and ask what the hell happened 20 years ago, not just wave around Never Forget banners and then move on.”

Siegel ([email protected]) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.