Twenty-Five Years Later, a 9/11 Memorial Made of Tape Is Back Online, and New Yorkers Can Walk It

NEW YORK, September 11, 2026. Between 2001 and 2005, the artists of Tape Art drew 490 life-size human figures on buildings and public spaces across Manhattan, each one dedicated to a person killed on September 11. The figures were made of painter's tape. They were meant to disappear, and they did. Plotted on a map, their locations trace four hearts spreading out from the World Trade Center site.

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks, that memorial is back at eleventhofseptember.com, rebuilt after the original 2006 site went dark. The new site restores the full archive, including the hundreds of short video podcasts Tape Art recorded, one at every location, and adds something the original never had: a "Walk" feature that lets anyone standing in Manhattan find the nearest figure and follow the heart-shaped route on foot.

HOW THE WALK WORKS
​Open eleventhofseptember.com on a phone, tap "Walk," then tap "Find nearest figure." The site reads the phone's location, points to the closest of the 490 figures, and lets the visitor move along one of the four heart-shaped paths. Location stays on the device. As the site puts it, "Your location is read on your phone and is never sent anywhere."

The Tape Art team walked one of the hearts through lower Manhattan this past Saturday to test the feature.

"We drew these figures to be temporary. Tape comes down, and the weather takes the rest," said Michael Townsend of Tape Art. "What we never wanted to be temporary was the act of walking to each of these people, one at a time, and standing where they were remembered. Twenty-five years later, the walk gives that back to anybody with a phone."

A STEALTH MEMORIAL, FIVE YEARS IN THE MAKING
​The project began in the weeks after September 11, 2001, when Tape Art decided to draw life-size silhouettes for the firefighters and airline passengers killed at the World Trade Center, 490 figures. Each tape figure is drawn to remember other victims of the attack and the artists spent five years checking and revising victim lists as identifications were confirmed. Most of the drawings went up without permission.

The Providence Journal called it "the world's first stealth-memorial."

The original website, published in 2006, documented every location with roughly 15,000 photographs along with maps, soundtracks, 360-degree panoramas, photo collages, and a short video podcast. The site fell offline in 2009 as web infrastructure changed, but was rebuilt by Gordon Wintrob in 2026.

"I went looking for the site one day, and it was gone. Fifteen thousand photographs, 490 videos, five years of work, unreachable," said Wintrob. "Rebuilding it was the easy part. The hard part was making sure every name still leads to a drawing, and every drawing still leads to a place you can stand."

Visitors can also search the names of all 490 people honored.

As the site says, "Every drawing is dedicated to one person and remembers others."

The site is free and works on any phone or browser.

LINK TO PHOTOS

ABOUT TAPE ART
​Tape Art began in Providence, RI in 1989 with a simple idea: tape could turn almost any surface into a drawing, then come down without leaving a trace. After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, three Tape Artists made a healing mural at the Myriad Convention Center. That mural changed how the group thought about temporary work: it could get people talking and grieving together.

Learn more at eleventhofseptember.com.

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In Loving Memory of Jeff Bitner (Middlebury Class of '96)