Almost immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, dazed New Yorkers came together to mourn, and to start making sense of what happened. For some, that meant creating shrines in parks and in front of firehouses. For the filmmakers Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder, it meant picking up their cameras -- but also, taking out a six-line classified ad in The Village Voice.
"Do you have video footage from the week of 9/11?" the ad asked. "You can contribute to history."
"Wherever you were, whatever you saw," it continued, you can help build "a testament to our city's heroism, pain, strength and resilience."
More than 100 people responded with footage shot from apartment windows and rooftops, on street corners and in parks. The material captured both the devastation of the attack and the collective mood of the immediate aftermath, when children chalked drawings of flowers next to mangled cars, and strangers gathered to process and, sometimes, argue.
Some of the footage was used in the couple's 2002 documentary, "Seven Days in September." But since then, the more than 500 hours of footage has gone largely unseen.
Now, the New York Public Library has acquired the couple's archive, which it says is the largest collection of video documentation of the attack and the days just after. It is being donated along with more than 700 hours of behind-the-scenes footage the couple also captured of the long, contentious process of creating the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Lower Manhattan.
The collection is expected to be open for use at the library in 2027 and will be available online in its entirety around 2030.
Julie Golia, the library's senior curator of manuscripts, called it a multilayered time capsule.
"It's about 9/11, but it's also a meta-documentation of the debate about its meaning," she said.
Sept. 11 has often been called the most photographed day in American history. But the archive marks a moment before today's digital deluge, when everyone with a cellphone camera is a documentarian.
"During Covid, you knew you were supposed to document it," Golia said. "You knew you were living during a historic time. But video from this earlier period feels different."
During an interview at their apartment on the Upper West Side, Rosenbaum, 64, and Yoder, 62, four-decade veterans of documentary film, came off like throwback characters from an earlier, funkier New York.
In one corner, there's a (still-working) old-school electromechanical pinball machine salvaged from the trash in their former office building. Across the room, sits a vintage jukebox, complete with a section for "fox trots and rumbas."
In 1995, Rosenbaum created "MTV News: "Unfiltered," which solicited story pitches from ordinary people via a 1-800 number, then gave them video cameras to make them. First-person storytelling, he said, "is in our DNA."
In 2009, after considering selling the Sept. 11 archive, the couple donated it to the museum, along with the right to use it for educational purposes. (The museum's founders page lists them among those who made donations valued between $500,000 and $999,999.) In return, they were granted full access to film the behind-the-scenes process of creating the museum, which opened in 2014.
But after viewing a cut of the resulting documentary, "The Outsider," the museum sent a legal letter requesting the removal of 36 scenes, which it said contained "inaccuracies and distortions." The filmmakers declined to make changes and in 2021 released their cut online, which accused the museum’s leadership of sanding down the political dimensions of the attack and the global war on terror it helped spawn.
The filmmakers also began looking for a new repository for their archive. They chose the library, they said, because of its commitment to full public access, including online.
The museum, which retains a copy of the archive, declined to comment on the deal with the library. But Erin Gaddis, its communications director, reiterated the belief that parts of the couple’s 2021 documentary were “disrespectful toward victims and their families.”
“At a moment when so many institutions in the U.S. are subject to ideological and partisan divisions, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum must remain a sacred space that seeks to educate and unify,” she said. “The film looked at the museum through a very specific ideological lens which we do not share.”
Even today, the memory of the attack remains politically fraught. President Trump is weighing a federal takeover of the 9/11 Museum, which has drawn criticism from some family members of victims over its executive pay and finances. (The museum, a private nonprofit with a $36 admission fee, drew 2.4 million visitors last year.)
Rosenberg and Yoder have their own point of view about Sept. 11. But they expect future scholars and creators to unearth entirely new story-lines and insights in the archive.
“My hope,” Rosenberg said,“is that what will come of it will be a total shock to us.”
The morning of Sept. 11, a crew from their production company was in the middle of shooting a documentary about the dogs of New York for Animal Planet. Instead, they sent seven camera teams to Lower Manhattan with a simple directive: Whichever way news cameras were pointing, point the other way.
They continued shooting the rest of the week and then began trying to piece together a documentary. But realizing they needed a broader range of perspectives, they placed the ad.
Ultimately, they acquired footage, mostly on Mini-DV cassettes, from about 130 people, with the requirement that they also sit for filmed interviews.
Payment, Rosenberg said, ranged from a dollar to several hundred dollars or more. Some people did not want to take any money. “They felt very, very guilty,” Rosenbaum said. “They thought they had done something voyeuristic.”
The archive includes shaky hand-held footage capturing the second plane hitting the north tower (and, after a few beats, expletives as the operator, Jennifer Spell, realizes what she had just seen), and people running from dust clouds as the south tower collapsed.
But the footage also captured the mood on the streets, the shellshocked camaraderie and the raw political debates that began almost immediately.
In one of the most vivid sequences, shot on Sept. 14 by one of their former employees, Rasheed Daniel, a diverse crowd at a vigil in Union Square starts verbally sparring after someone chalks the words “The American Flag Propagates Violence” onto the pavement.
There’s almost theatrical dialogue about grief, vengeance, American foreign policy, Islam. At one point, a middle-aged man in a construction union hat and a young woman erupt into a screaming argument, then stagger into an embrace as they both describe finding body parts at the attack site, repeating “We fight, and then we hug.”
The archive, like other crowdsourced projects that arose soon after the attacks, mixes amateur and professional efforts,the grim and the lyrical,the literal and the experimental.
“Individually,the tapes couldn’t tell enough of the story,” Yoder said.“But as a collective,the perspectives and the breadth tells all of it.”
Placing the collection at the library,Yoder said,“lifted a weight.”But still,it was strange to see the tapes carried out of their apartment in a few boxes.
“I always tell people it’s like having a puppy,” she said.“It’s not just this inanimate object that sits there.You have to take care of it.”