Village Preservation Releases Nearly 1,000 Crowdsourced Images of the World Trade Center, 9/11, and Aftermath, with Moving Personal Stories

We are proud to release nearly 1,000 images donated by the public to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks on the World Trade Center. Earlier this year we asked the public to share their images connected to the World Trade Center, the attacks, and the aftermath, and received hundreds of images from multiple individuals.

Images and collections include:

• Stunning images of people in Washington Square and Greenwich Village watching as the World Trade Center towers burned, were struck by the second plane, and fell, taken and donated by a Greenwich Village merchant who watched the terror attacks unfold.
• Powerful images of the attacks on the World Trade Center as they occurred taken from a rooftop just a dozen blocks to the north, as well as the aftermath in the surrounding neighborhood, taken by a longtime downtown resident and community leader.
• Extensive images of the recovery and cleanup of Ground Zero donated by the widow of Sonny Deluccy, who supervised some of those operations and succumbed to lung cancer in 2004, like so many of the rescue and recovery workers.
• Moving images of “Point Thank You,” the months-long gathering of New Yorkers at the corner of West and Christopher Street to thank rescue and recovery workers as they traveled to and from Ground Zero, taken and donated by a local resident who helped coordinate the effort.
• Personal images of the “Missing” signs that proliferated after the attacks as family sought to find unaccounted for relatives and loved ones who worked at the World Trade Center, public remembrances of 9/11 victims, and images of the world Trade Center prior to its destruction.
• Documentation of the 9/11 Memorial “Tiles for America,” one of the first permanent memorials dedicated to the events of September 11th, 2001, and one of the few permanent ones anywhere created collectively by members of the public.

All images in our special 9/11 20th Anniversary Collection can be found here and here (first eight collections). We are incredibly grateful to those who shared their deeply personal images and stories with us, and allowed us to share them with the public. We hope to honor and preserve those memories. If you would like to donate any historic image to us, email info@gvshp.org. View our entire Historic Image Archive of more than 3,600 images from the late 18th to the early 21st century here.