Steven Rosenbaum knew his day was changing as soon as he saw United Airlines Flight 175 hit the south tower of the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n
He already had several documentary crews with him in his office on Fifth Avenue. Rosenbaum and his wife had co-founded the media company Broadcast News Network.<\/p>\n
They were preparing to start recording a series for Animal Planet.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were in the room, in the conference room, watching a large TV when the second plane hit,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd from that second, everything changed.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted to be there, and one person who was leaving turned to me and said, \u2018Well, what do we shoot?\u2019 I said, you\u2019ll all be down there, there\u2019ll be lots of news crews,\u201d he recalled saying. \u201cThey\u2019ll all be pointing at the buildings. Just see where the news crews are pointing. And point in the opposite direction.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the goal was to see how the day was affecting the city. It turned into what Rosenbaum said is the largest archive of 9\/11-related video.<\/p>\n
Some of his crews shot video through the night. When they came back in the morning, they asked what was next.<\/p>\n
Rosenbaum said he knew the Animal Planet project was not going to happen.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I said, \u2018We\u2019re going to keep shooting,\u2019\u201d he remembered. \u201cAnd someone said, \u2018Well, for how long?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Seven days.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Every day, they would come up with a list of potential stories to showcase. Some may have been traditionally newsworthy. Others were not.<\/p>\n
Rosenbaum showed NY1 a sequence of a video showing someone who ran a fruit stand in lower Manhattan. He was taking each piece of fruit, one by one, and trying to remove the dust from the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n
His crews shot the massive volunteer efforts underway at the Javits Center, where people brought food for the rescue workers.<\/p>\n
They went to the Upper East Side to a mosque, where Muslims were raising money for the victims of the terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re trying to, in fact, also with these donations, show that we are also Americans. And we are just as much involved in this tragedy as everybody else,\u201d one woman shared at the time. \u201cAnd we are doing our part to help the families and victims who have been involved in this great tragedy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rosenbaum wanted more footage. He decided to place an ad in the Village Voice asking anyone with footage from 9\/11 or the immediate aftermath to contact him.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur phone\u00a0went bananas,\u201d he recalled. \u201cSo that became our job for a\u00a0month\u00a0and a half was, footage would come in, we’d watch it, we’d say, we absolutely want this.\u201d<\/p>\n
That is how his film, \u201c7 Days in September,\u201d was born.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew that I wanted historians to be able to\u00a0look at\u00a0the film in 25 years and know that not only was it interesting and complicated, but it was also historically\u00a0accurate, and that every moment of footage you saw that was dated Thursday was from Thursday,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In all, Rosenbaum and his wife\u2019s collection of 9\/11 footage \u2014 up through about the first week \u2014 is 700 hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you talk to people in the archive business, what they’ll tell you is things that aren’t cataloged and archived become invisible to history because there’s no way to see it,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t anticipate being archivists, but Rosenbaum said no one has stepped in who has that background.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you do when you have the world’s largest archive of 9\/11\u00a0video? I mean, you\u00a0don’t\u00a0throw it away,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u00a0don’t\u00a0leave it out in the street and hope somebody picks it up like a refrigerator.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said that\u2019s why they started having conversations with the New York Public Library about the library taking the entire collection. Last year, the library announced Rosenbaum was donating it all.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe knew it needed to be somewhere. We knew that it needed to be stored somewhere with public access,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He believes long-term, that\u2019s what is best for the footage he has accumulated.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re stewards of the material, but we’re not owners of it. So at the end of the day, we think there are scholars who will say, I want to know about how X, Y or Z community was treated on 9\/11, and they’ll need to sit and look at hundreds of hours of material, and they\u2019ll discover something we didn\u2019t see,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He said he believes that will happen, and is far more likely to occur at the public library.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you talk to historians, they will tell you everything up to 25 years\u00a0is\u00a0current events, and everything after 25 years is history,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSo\u00a0really,\u00a0we’re\u00a0at the moment where history really begins,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd the footage is part of that. The films are part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steven Rosenbaum knew his day was changing as soon as he saw United Airlines Flight 175 hit the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338856,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[113412,3801,9,24,63,122,124,123,200,7037],"class_list":["post-338855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-9-11-25th-anniversary","tag-eric-feldman","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-vod","tag-world-trade-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}