Hundreds of hours of harrowing, never-before-seen first-person footage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath will soon be unveiled at the New York Public Library in a new historic archive — and The Post got an exclusive first peek Thursday.
A total of 500 hours of new footage includes striking images from Ground Zero recovery efforts, destroyed subway tunnels and pet rescue missions, library officials said Thursday, on the 24th anniversary of the attacks.
Never-before-seen footage released exclusively to The Post, titled “Nighttime Recovery,” shows smoke rising in gloomy gray plumes at Ground Zero as first responders dig through piles of rubble with an orange excavator.
Other camerawork, released exclusively to The Post, shows workers trying to fix a leaky, blasted-out subway tunnel at the Cortland Street station, near the World Trade Center.
Other new footage — shot largely on hand-held cameras, before the proliferation of smartphones — shows a bomb scare at the Empire State Building on Sept. 12, 2002, a light tribute from the Westside Pier and a nighttime time lapse of World Trade Center shots.
The 1,200-plus hours of video in the archive documenting the unthinkable tragedy won’t be unveiled to the general public until 2027, said Brent Reidy, director of the research libraries for the New York Public Library.
The collection, dubbed the CameraPlanet Archive, was donated by Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder and is the largest contemporaneous video collection of Sept. 11.
To mark the donation, the New York Public Library will host a screening of “7 Days in September,” a film by Rosenbaum, on Sept. 11, 2025, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
