Bensonhurst man turns NYC’s 9/11 records into a clickable map

A Brooklyn man has built 911records.nyc, a website that places the more than 170,000 pages of city 9/11 records released last week by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration on a clickable map of Lower Manhattan.

Henry Williams, a project manager from Bensonhurst, said the city’s own portal confused him because it offered no context or guide. On Sunday he downloaded every available page and put his version together in a few hours. He hosts the site on servers at his home.

How the 911records.nyc map works

Visitors see a 3D map of the individual Lower Manhattan addresses that turn up in the records released so far. Clicking any dot pulls up all the available documents tied to that location, something the administration’s site does not offer.

“There’s a difference between making it available and making it accessible,” Williams said. He has made data tools before, among them one that tells travelers how early to arrive at the airport and a set of maps that predict subway delays.

A family’s fight with the 9/11 victim compensation fund

The project is personal. His father-in-law, Hughie Yee, worked as a database analyst at Deutsche Bank near the World Trade Center and was on the job when the attacks happened. Williams said Yee was in the dust cloud when the towers collapsed. Yee became sick two years ago and died of lung cancer last year.

Yee’s first claim to the victims compensation fund was rejected. The reason: he had no pair of eyewitnesses able to confirm the dust had coated him that day. His family appealed, but when his hearing finally came, a tracheotomy had left him unable to speak. The fund approved the appeal, and Yee died a week later. Williams said the hunt for proof and paperwork was so frustrating that it pushed him to build the site. Whether the records could have sped up Yee’s case is unclear.

Advocates and survivors had sued to get the records out. Mamdani settled two lawsuits and committed $34 million to the release. He has said the documents reveal what the city knew about the toxic air near ground zero, when officials learned it and what they did to limit the city’s liability.

City Hall welcomed Williams’s work. Getting the public to engage with the records is the reason the administration put resources behind releasing them, mayoral spokesperson Sam Raskin said in a statement.