Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, which claimed the lives of 2,977 victims, mostly at New York’s World Trade Center. Now, Michael Townsend, an artist best known for infiltrating a Rhode Island mall, has revived the long-defunct website documenting Eleventh of September, the guerrilla 9/11 memorial street art project he carried out with a scrappy team of collaborators.
For the five years after 9/11, Townsend and the other artists quietly and diligently worked on a massive tribute to that day, using colorful painter’s tape to make life-size portraits of the 490 firefighters, airline passengers, and crew members who died. (Each portrait also commemorates between one and 10 other victims, represented by the number of fingers the figure holds up.) Eleventh of September not only remembered the day’s tragic events. It also honored the heroism of the first responders who rushed to the scene.
This was also a rogue project, carried out without permission. The artists set the works along three heart-shaped paths across the island of Manhattan, on the walls of convenience stores, between doorways, and wherever the route led—whether they were welcome or not.
“It was tense and harrowing,” Townsend told me, recalling countless encounters with security guards, shop owners, and other people who would try to stop the creation of the unauthorized artworks. On the other hand, some pieces would become impromptu community art workshops. And when police officers saw the artists drawing the silhouettes of firefighters, they often gave a tacit nod of approval and looked the other way, especially in the early years.
Each portrait took about 15 minutes to complete—although there are definitely some rush jobs, done in as little as five minutes, when they knew someone in authority would disapprove. (Townsend has a theory that some graffiti is bad because the artist had to look over their shoulder the whole time.)
The Artist’s Biggest Failure
The portraits, of course, were ephemeral by nature, some remaining in place just a few minutes before the tape came down. One notable exception was on a heavily graffitied metal door in an alleyway on Jay Street that somehow lasted at least seven years. But Townsend expected that property owners would remove the works, or that they would soon succumb to the elements. Sometimes, the team even worked on furniture left out for garbage day—and in one case, a recently-sold wardrobe, awaiting pickup from the Grand Bazaar market on the Upper West Side. The website documenting the project was supposed to provide a lasting record of the endeavor.
Creating the website was a massive undertaking of its own, featuring over 15,000 photographs of the portraits. The artists carefully researched each of their subjects, and recorded 19 hours of video podcasts about the creation of the individual portraits and the lives of those depicted. It was intended to function as a guided tour of the heart-shaped pathways, so that you could view it on your flip phone, walking along the route to see where the art had been.
“Anybody who dared to cross the threshold into our studio space just got vacuumed into that project,” Townsend said, describing inane tasks such as manually renaming 7,000 files to append a few numbers and a dash to the front of the name.
The website took 30,000 hours to build, finally going live in 2006. Just a few years later, it was largely unusable. Townsend considers it his biggest failure.
“We launched this thing on the fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center coming down, and within a couple of years most of the major assets were broken,” Townsend said. “We were doing things in QuickTime that became unsupported soon after we launched.”
Staging Guerrilla Art Projects
I interviewed Townsend last year about Secret Mall Apartment, a fascinating documentary about how he and seven artists found an empty space hidden inside the Providence Place mall and moved in, occupying the “apartment” from 2003 to 2007. The artwork, if one could call it that, was a rebuttal to consumerism and gentrification. But it also offered its participants—Townsend, his then-wife Adriana Valdez Young, Andrew Oesch, Jay Zehngebot, Colin Bliss, James Mercer, Greta Scheing, and Emily Ustach—an escape from the emotional weight of the rest of their practice, including Eleventh of September.
The film goes beyond the mall hijinks—eluding security, setting off alarms, smuggling in couches and cinderblocks—to delve into Tape Art, the art collective Townsend founded in 1989 and now runs with artist Leah Smith. They create temporary murals with colorful painter’s tape—sometimes for public art commissions, but often with activism in mind. They offer educational workshops for children, create installations in hospitals and correctional facilities, and have even decorated temporary housing in the wake of natural disasters.
Tape Art’s work with memorials began when Townsend happened to be in Oklahoma City for an art festival during the 1994 bombing carried out by Timothy McVeigh. Townsend made a three-story Tape Art piece, The Hope Mural, inside the first responder headquarters, visible only to emergency personnel, and returned 10 years later, during the Secret Mall Apartment days, to make a new mural with local children.
Townsend had a studio in Jersey City in 2001, and could see the smoke rising above Manhattan. When the New York Times published the photographs of all the firefighters who had died on 9/11, he realized he had met some of them in Oklahoma City, since the FDNY had sent rescue units down to assist with the recovery.
Reviving a Broken Website
The documentary triggered a wave of interest in Eleventh of September. Townsend and Smith were happy to share individual drawings with family members, but they knew that resuscitating the full website was impossible—unless someone did it for them.
Just three weeks before the 25th anniversary, that someone appeared. His name is Gordon Wintrob, a 35-year-old technology entrepreneur and artificial intelligence expert. He told Townsend and Smith he wanted to help.
“He asked us to send him everything we had. That was five years of spreadsheets, photographs, videos, the original websites, maps, databases,” Townsend said. “He put it all inside of whatever tools he’s using, and it barfed out a usable website in like two days.”
There were remarkably few errors to troubleshoot in the first draft—and, in a testament to the obsessive attention to detail in the original project, very few mistakes in the original data. (Cross-referencing various lists of 9/11 victims, the artists actually identified so many errors in the records, they became friendly with New York’s chief medical examiner from calling in corrections.)
The new website solves all the technical limitations from the original rollover design. It also features 360-degree photos of each portrait, capturing fascinating little slices of New York City from before the advent of Google Street View in 2007. (The artists took the photos with the panorama function on the same point-and-shoot Pentax Optio S4i digital camera featured in Secret Mall Apartment, stitching together the images using Photoshop.)
“It’s such a treat to have 2001 to 2005 frozen in time,” Townsend said.
But mostly, Townsend and Smith are just excited to share Eleventh of September with the world—an artists’ tribute to one of the worst days in American history, and a celebration of the lives of those who died that day, now finally preserved for posterity.