After the Twin Towers fell, life-size human silhouettes made of tape appeared all over New York City — on roll-down gates, construction fences, mailboxes, and building facades. The collective Tape Art spent three years drawing them: 490 profiles representing every lost firefighter and airport passenger, the only death counts then set in stone, with taped hands holding up fingers to account for everyone else. The memorials were ephemeral by design, but the group documented each one obsessively — testimonials, photographs, original music — and built a website to make the impermanent permanent.

That site launched in 2005 and was dead by 2009, a casualty of QuickTime, Flash, and flip-phone-era code. For years it sat offline. Then a San Francisco tech entrepreneur, Gordon Wintrob, discovered the project through the 2024 documentary “Secret Mall Apartment,” asked Tape Art founder Michael Townsend for the archived files, and restored the whole thing in under a week with AI tooling — all original content, made usable again.

  • What’s back: the Tape Art 9/11 memorial archive — photos of all 490 silhouettes at their street locations, testimonials about the people remembered, and original music composed for the project
  • Where the memorials went up: citywide — roll-down gates and construction fences, plus spots from East 20th St. to West 68th St., including rocks in Central Park
  • The rescue: Wintrob rebuilt the 2005-era site from Townsend’s impeccably organized but dated archive files, “feeding it into a machine that can barf out a usable version”
  • Why now: back online just in time for the 25th anniversary of 9/11 this Wednesday
  • Cost: free to browse

Townsend called the resurrection “a beautiful collision of these two worlds” — AI and tape art. Seeing the restored site, he said, he was “gobsmacked”: “I didn’t burst into tears, but darn close.” It’s a reminder that in the months after 9/11 grief took physical, public form on ordinary New York walls — and that someone cared enough about those fragile markers to bring their record back from an obsolete web.