Village Preservation Unveils Two New 9/11 Photo Collections

The Village Preservation Society has added two new 9/11 collections to its photo archives of the attacks, adding to its nine existing ones. The Danielle Sevier and Annie Shaver-Crandell collections can be viewed by making an appointment with Village Preservation, or online at villagepreservation.org/image-archive.

Village Preservation notes that Danielle Sevier was raised in Brooklyn and at the time of the 9/11 attacks lived in Greenwich Village, where she was a photographer and a young mother. She was “moved by the outpouring of emotion in response to the events and the way they manifested in memorials and other visible public responses around her,” the Society explains, “[particularly] by how many chose not to focus on the destruction of the attacks, but the resilience of so many of the people affected by it.”

Notable images from Sevier’s collection include “ ‘Many Hands. One Hope. United We Stand’ banner along Hudson River,” which depicts an American flag composed of finger-painted palms—both red and blue—hanging on a fence overlooking the Hudson.

Another image depicts a sign affixed to a lamppost at a 9/11 memorial in Union Square. “How would our dead prefer us to mark our gravestones?” the sign asks. “ ‘They killed you, so you killed them in our name’ or ‘I no longer had you to love, so I learned to love the world.’ Choose Peace.”

Village Preservation describes NoHo resident Annie Shaver-Crandell, meanwhile, as an “internationally published medieval art historian and professor emeritus from the City College of New York, where she taught the history of art for over three decades.”

Shaver-Crandell also serves on the board of directors for the Salmagundi Club, the prominent arts organization located on Fifth Avenue, and served as national president of the Women’s Caucus for Art from 1986 to 1988. Shaver-Crandell’s late husband, Keith Crandell, was a prominent local activist and leader of Greenwich Village’s Community Board in the 1990s. He was also awarded a Village Award by Village Preservation in 2005.

One of the photos in Shaver-Crandell’s 9/11 collection is of Keith, who is wearing a shirt with an inscription of a poem on it: “Love thy neighbor, Thy poor neighbor, Thy Jewish neighbor, Thine addicted neighbor, Thy gay neighbor, Thy black neighbor, Thy white neighbor, Thy Muslim neighbor, Thy crippled neighbor, Thy Christian neighbor, Thine atheist neighbor, Thy Latino neighbor, Thy homeless neighbor.”

Another image depicts Buddhists chanting at Union Square, while other images are of the Twin Towers being struck by the hijacked planes, captured by Shaver-Crandell’s camera from the roof of 39 Bond St. One photo contrasts a missing poster for Cantor-Fitzgerald employee Jacquelyn Sanchez—638 employees of the finance firm were killed when the first plane struck the North Tower—with what the collection describes as an “exhortation for peace”: “Our grief is not a cry for war!”

Other Village Preservation collections about 9/11 include those by Beverly Wallace, Robert Fisch, Richard Corman, Robert A. Ripps, and Lenore Mills. Other collections are organized by location, such as one about the attacks as “viewed from Greenwich Village,” or photos of the 9/11 Memorial.