Hidden Cameras Capture Trade Center Site’s Rebirth

 by Etta Sanders

Through the black-curtained window of a closet at the offices of Dow Jones, a movie camera peers down, nine stories, at Ground Zero. Every five minutes it quietly whirs, taking one more picture. At five other hidden perches—47 stories high in the World Financial Center, atop buildings on Broadway and Church Street, at the firehouse on Liberty Street, and in the churchyard of St. Paul’s—cameras record the orange-vested workers and lumbering bulldozers on the 16-acre World Trade Center site.

Project Rebirth's Jim Whitaker, left, and David Solomon atop 115 Broadway, which houses one of six cameras shooting the World Trade Center site. Photo: Sabastian Salgado

Day and night for up to 10 years, these six cameras will expose a frame of film every five minutes, recording an almost moment-by-moment history of the rebuilding on the site, as part of an ambitious documentary film called Project Rebirth.

The result will be a time-lapse movie that will show, in a mere 20 minutes, the PATH station and transit hub, the Freedom Tower, a memorial, stores and office buildings spring to life. Falling leaves will blur into snowfall that melts into summer haze, like flipping the pages of a calendar.

“Our hope is that we can create an environment that people can go into, six screens representing the six camera positions that will surround an audience and allow them the experience of the buildings literally rising up around them,” said Jim Whitaker, Project Rebirth’s producer.

In a parallel project, Whitaker is conducting annual interviews with 10 people directly affected by the attack, including a firefighter who lost friends and colleagues, a teenage boy whose mother died, a recovery worker who spent months on “the pile,” and a woman who was one of the few to escape from above the airplane’s impact. That footage will be edited into a feature documentary. The two films will comprise what Whitaker calls a physical and emotional time lapse.

Whitaker, a vice president at Imagine Entertainment, the production company headed by Ron Howard and Brian Glazer, came to Tribeca in October 2001 for the wedding of his college roommate, Nick Wood. After he saw the destruction firsthand, the idea for Project Rebirth came to him.

Wood and Whitaker shot a test film out of a window in Wood’s Hudson Street apartment. Along with co-producer David Solomon, they used that 10-minute sample film to request permission to install cameras at other locations. “We were asking for them to provide an opportunity to put a camera for 10 years,” Whitaker said. “It’s not a small thing to ask.”

In May 2002 the first camera, in a specially designed temperature-controlled house, was placed on the roof of 30 Vesey Street. The opening shots captured the last days of the cleanup effort.

The project is estimated to cost $8 million. Five million dollars’ worth of in-kind donations for film and processing has been promised; the first big cash contribution they received, $400,000, came from the father of another of Whitaker’s college classmates, who heads AON Corp., a company that lost 175 employees in the attacks. The filmmakers must still raise another $3.3 million.

The team has submitted a proposal to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. to have the film shown as part of the planned museum at the site. If that doesn’t work out, they will search for another museum space for the more than six million frames.

“This is history in the making,” Whitaker said. “In a hundred years, when people look back and say, ‘What did we do? How did we respond?’ they’ll be able to look at this film and say, ‘This is exactly what we did.’”