A Netflix documentary about a secret mall apartment led to rediscovering Tape Art’s The Eleventh of September, a large-scale 9/11 memorial made of 490 life-size tape silhouettes arranged along four giant heart routes across Manhattan. Each figure’s raised fingers counted additional victims, and the artists documented the work with photographs, QuickTime panoramas, and videos; they spent more than 30,000 volunteer hours over five years and read about each person before drawing them. The original site that preserved the names, locations, and multimedia went offline; while the raw files survived, the server-side database and the web “glue” that connected pages were missing.
Restoration began when the author offered help and teamed with current Tape Art stewards, Mike and Leah, to piece the archive back together. A surviving flip-phone version provided an index of names and locations; AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex) and custom scripts were used to inventory files, reassemble sliced Photoshop images, convert old video formats, and reconnect dedications, with disputes tracked in an issues.json log. The rebuilt site pre-renders pages so it needs no legacy database or QuickTime plug-ins, and a new Walk feature lets visitors follow the hearts on their phones using restored panoramas. Launched for the 25th anniversary, the relaunch drew about 2,000 unique visitors and restored public access to the memorial.
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