‘Messy, Difficult’: A User-Friendly Portal for New York’s 9/11 Documents

Henry Williams read the news of the release of long-suppressed 9/11 city documents last week with curiosity, but he soon found a confusing portal without any context or guide.

A project manager by day, he said he was always “interested in messy, difficult data.” Here, he found plenty.

So on Sunday, Williams downloaded the more than 170,000 pages available through the city’s portal and got to work on his own, more user-friendly site.

“If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re never going to find it in this platform, because there’s nothing there,” he said. “There’s a difference between making it available and making it accessible.”

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He created 911records.nyc in a few hours, hosted on servers at his Bensonhurst home. Visitors can see a 3D map of how many individual addresses clustered around Lower Manhattan are included so far in the records. 

In a major upgrade from the Mamdani administration’s site, every available document is pulled up by clicking on an individual dot.

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Williams has built tools before that clean up complicated data. One helps fliers see how early they should arrive at the airport, while another set of maps can predict subway delays, ranking stations for “awfulness” and “badness.”

But his 9/11 records map was more personal. 

Williams’s father-in-law, Hughie Yee, died last year of lung cancer after first becoming sick two years ago. He was a database analyst at Deutsche Bank, steps away from the World Trade Center, and at work when the attacks happened. 

“He was there when they collapsed, he was in the cloud, he got covered in ash and he was breathing all that garbage in,” Williams said.

Yee was initially denied assistance from the victims compensation fund, unable to find two witnesses who saw him covered in dust. His family appealed, but by the time he was allowed to plead his case, Yee had undergone a tracheotomy and couldn’t speak at his own hearing. 

Yee was finally approved for money on the appeal; he died a week later. 

“It was a really frustrating process to find any proof or any paperwork and that’s kind of what motivated me here,” Williams said.

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It’s not clear if these records could have helped Yee’s family get him approved earlier for funds, but the hope is they could offer more help for families whose loved ones get sick. 

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration released the records following a yearslong fight by advocates and survivors, who sued for their release. Mamdani settled two lawsuits and allocated $34 million to help facilitate the documents’ release.

At last week’s announcement, the mayor said the documents “will help New Yorkers access the health care they need.”

“These are documents that show what the city knew about the toxic air around Ground Zero, when they knew it and how they acted to limit liability,” he said.

Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for the mayor, praised the project.

“Making these records accessible and encouraging the public to engage with them is exactly why the Mamdani administration dedicated the resources necessary to bring them to light,” he said in a statement.

For Williams, this project is the most meaningful to him and his wife, Jennifer.

“If we can see it helping other people, it would be a good way to honor her father’s memory,” he said.

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