The 9/11 Tape She Couldn't Watch: A Chinatown Woman Faces Her Own Footage, 25 Years On

The MiniDV tape moved with her through five apartments in two boroughs, riding in the same shoebox as old tax returns and a ring of keys that no longer opened anything. She labeled it once, in black marker, and never played it. On a humid evening this month, two weeks before the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack, the woman who filmed the destruction of the World Trade Center from her Chinatown fire escape finally pressed play.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, she was a recent college graduate renting a fourth-floor walk-up on a narrow street in Chinatown, roughly a mile northeast of the trade center. The first impact, at 8:46 a.m., sounded to her like a truck crash or a transformer blowing. From the fire escape she could see the gash in the north tower and the smoke pulling sideways across a cloudless sky. She went back inside, grabbed the camcorder she had used for student films, and started recording.

The footage runs a little over an hour. It shows the north tower burning, then the second plane banking into the south tower at 9:03 a.m., a fireball that on the tape draws a collective gasp from the fire escapes around her. It shows the collapses at 9:59 and 10:28 a.m., each one sending a gray wall of dust boiling up the canyons of Lower Manhattan. And it captures her own voice, barely above a whisper, repeating a phrase she says she has no memory of saying.

Chinatown lived the attack at close range. The dust cloud rolled over the neighborhood, the police cordon that sealed the streets south of Canal Street choked off deliveries and customers for weeks, and the collapse that shredded the Verizon switching building at 140 West Street knocked out phone service across the area, leaving residents lined up at pay phones to reach family overseas. Garment factories sat idle and restaurant tables emptied long after the ash was swept from the sidewalks.

I realized the tape was going to outlast me whether I watched it or not. I wanted to see it while it still belonged to me.

What she could not do, for nearly a quarter century, was watch the tape. She fast-forwarded past anniversary coverage and left the room when documentaries came on. Friends who knew about the footage eventually stopped asking. Psychologists who have studied the witnesses of that day describe her response as common: avoidance is one of the most durable reactions to trauma, and anniversaries tend to test it hardest.

Two things changed this year. The first was arithmetic: a college student born in 2001 turns 25 this fall, and she kept meeting young New Yorkers for whom the attack is a chapter in a textbook. The second was the approach of the anniversary itself, which the city will mark on Sept. 11 with the annual reading of the names at the memorial plaza and the Tribute in Light rising over Lower Manhattan. 'I realized the tape was going to outlast me whether I watched it or not,' she said. 'I wanted to see it while it still belonged to me.'

She borrowed a camcorder that could still play MiniDV cassettes, since her own had died years ago, and digitized the footage at her kitchen table. The details that came back first were small ones, she said: how blue the sky was, how the paper drifting from the towers caught the light, how the pigeons kept circling the fire escape. She cried through the collapses. When the screen finally went dark, she said, she felt grief, but also something she had not expected: a kind of steadiness, as if the day had finally finished happening.

Archivists say her experience is hardly unique. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum holds thousands of hours of amateur video in its collection, much of it shot from windows, rooftops and fire escapes across the city, and curators say new material still surfaces every year as anniversaries approach. Historians credit that flood of bystander footage with reshaping how Americans remember the attack: not as a single broadcast image, but as millions of individual vantage points, each with its own soundtrack of sirens and disbelief.

She has not decided what to do with the footage and is weighing an offer to donate a copy to the museum's collection. For now, the original tape sits on a shelf in her living room, out of the shoebox at last. On the morning of Sept. 11, she said, she plans to walk down to the memorial plaza for the first time in years, this time without a camera.