Ground Zero, the Long View

New York Times ^ | September 8, 2004 | SARAH BOXER

[OESY]

In the fall of 2001 when the dust and ash from the World Trade Center were still in the air, Jim Whitaker, a documentary filmmaker, decided to photograph everything happening at ground zero. By the spring of 2002 three cameras were pointed at the pit, each taking one shot every five minutes, round the clock. Months later, three more cameras were added.

That was the beginning of Project Rebirth, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a historical record of the rebuilding.

Today www.projectrebirth.org, a Web site produced with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and AOL , opens for public viewing. The site includes links to the architects who are building at ground zero; profiles of 10 people whose lives were altered by Sept. 11; an interview with Kevin Rampe, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation; the view from a live Web camera at the site; and a timeline that you can click on to watch short movies of milestone events there.

But the main attraction is the time-lapse photography, showing (on a very tiny screen, 3½ inches by 2½ inches) what the six cameras have been seeing all along. Each camera has a distinctive view and a different reason for being there.

One camera, on the roof of 30 Vesey Street, at the corner of Church Street, gives a wide view down from the northeast corner of ground zero. The weather comes right at the camera: rain, mist and snow. And the shadows from the buildings nearby often upstage the activity in the pit.

Another camera is 47 stories up, in the American Express Building at 3 World Financial Center at the northwest corner of the site. It "has an omniscience to it," Mr. Whitaker, the director of Project Rebirth, said.

So far this camera has provided the most complete view. You can watch the PATH station going up: the girders, the tracks, the first layer, the second layer. And when the Freedom Tower starts to rise, Mr. Whitaker promised, it will look as if the new building were heading right for the camera. As the tower ascends above the lens, the camera will tilt up to watch.

The camera on the roof of 115 Broadway, the current home of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is at the southeast corner of ground zero. Because you can see the building's old stone parapets, the pictures from this camera have a nostalgic feel. The snow accumulates and melts on the stonework while the construction unfolds beyond it.

But the grandest view comes from the southwest corner. Here a Vista Vision camera, the very camera that Cecil B. DeMille used to film "The Ten Commandments," is perched on the ninth floor of the Dow Jones Building, where there is a memorial for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter abducted and killed in Pakistan in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The picture is crisp and very wide. "You see New York life passing by, cruising by," Mr. Whitaker said. The shots hum with traffic and cloud drift.

That covers the four corners of the site. What was missing, said Thomas Lappin, the director of photography for Project Rebirth, was a camera at ground level to show "the human scale." So a camera was planted 18 inches off the ground in the graveyard behind St. Paul's Church. Its pictures are filled with tombstones, trees and sky.

"It's a little reprieve from the full site, the big wound," Mr. Lappin said.

Another close-up camera was installed on the roof of the firehouse that was closest to the World Trade Center: Engine 10, Ladder 10. Nicknamed "1010," the camera is there partly for symbolic purposes, Mr. Whitaker said, to represent the "heroism of the firehouse." It also shows details well: girders going up, cranes turning crazily round and round and a flag flapping in the foreground.

That same firehouse perch is now also being shared by a digital Webcam that has just been installed.

Originally, Mr. Whitaker said, he planned to photograph at ground zero for seven years, but now he thinks he will keep the cameras running for at least 10, at a cost of some $8 million (and this is with the film being donated by Kodak and the processing by Deluxe). He said he was hoping that Project Rebirth would be one of the institutions represented at the World Trade Center site. If it is, he wants to install six screens in one room so that viewers can see the whole building process from all six angles over the course of 20 minutes.

If not, though, no shot will be lost. Mr. Whitaker, the president of Imagine Entertainment, the movie production company founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, plans to make a documentary with the time-lapse footage. (You can watch a trailer of the movie at the Web site.) And eventually everything that the six cameras have seen, millions of feet of film, he said, will go to the Library of Congress.

At first Mr. Whitaker approached ground zero with dread and anxiety, he said. But when he saw the pile of rubble visibly diminish in a matter of days, he started feeling more optimistic. He wanted to capture that feeling, he said, and the speed with which the cleanup was taking place. Time-lapse photography was the ticket.

What is most striking now from the time-lapse view, though, is just how slow the rebuilding has been. The days, the weeks, the snow, the rain, the shadows, the day, the night, the traffic, the seasons all pass. Meanwhile the pit remains. It is the most stable thing in the pictures. And that is the view that has been edited for the Web site. The unedited dailies, Mr. Lappin said, are "incredibly repetitive."

[OESY]

Third of three photos: A view of ground zero from the Project Rebirth time-lapse camera 47 stories up on
the American Express Building, at the northwest corner of the site, taken in autumn 2003.

[Zilch]

Thanks for the info.
Looks like my home town is rebuilding and will be greater than before