delip/sep11docs

NYC September 11 Document Release

This dataset is a snapshot of the PDF documents published by the City of New York on its September 11 document release portal:

https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/

It contains 24441 PDF files (36.6 GB) exactly as they were served by the portal, together with the URL each file was fetched from and the archival location (agency, box, folder) the portal lists for it.

What is in the data

Column	Type	Description
doc_id	string	Document identifier, the PDF filename without the .pdf extension (for example NYC-WTC_000000001). Unique per row.
pdf_url	string	The portal URL the PDF was downloaded from.
location_tag	string	Archival location as shown on the portal, with levels separated by › (for example Environmental Protection, Dept. of › DEP Box 04 › 524).
pdf_path	string	Relative path of the file in the original download tree (pdfs/<bucket>/<doc_id>.pdf). Kept for provenance and for joining with local copies.
pdf_content	pdf	The PDF file itself, stored as bytes. Rendered with thumbnails in the Dataset Viewer and decoded to a pdfplumber object by the datasets library.

There is a single train split. The data is stored as 36 Parquet shards under data/.

Where it came from and when

The documents were made public by the City of New York under the administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani through the September 11 document release portal. The City built and maintains the portal; this dataset simply mirrors what it published.

All files were downloaded from https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/ on 2026-09-09. The list of document URLs and their location tags was collected from the portal's public listing on the same day.

This is a snapshot

The City of New York may add, replace, or remove documents on the portal after this initial tranche was collected. This dataset reflects only what was available on 2026-09-09 and will not track later changes automatically.

The intent of publishing it here is to make large scale processing, search, and study of the collection easier than fetching tens of thousands of individual files from the portal. If a specific document matters to your work, please verify it against the live copy on the portal, which is the authoritative source.

Disclaimer

Our interest is in making these records widely accessible given their national importance. We have not processed, filtered, redacted, OCRed, or otherwise altered the documents in any way. Each file is byte for byte what the portal served at download time. Any text, metadata, or redactions inside the PDFs come from the City's release, not from us.

The records were released by the City of New York. If you notice personally identifiable information (PII) or other content that you believe should not be public, please contact the City through the document release portal at https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/ rather than the dataset maintainers, since only the City can correct the source release.

Loading

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("delip/sep11docs", split="train")
row = ds[0]
print(row["doc_id"], row["location_tag"])
pdf = row["pdf_content"]            # pdfplumber.pdf.PDF
print(pdf.pages[0].extract_text())

To skip decoding and work with raw bytes:

from datasets import Pdf
ds = ds.cast_column("pdf_content", Pdf(decode=False))
raw = ds[0]["pdf_content"]["bytes"]

To stream without downloading everything:

ds = load_dataset("delip/sep11docs", split="train", streaming=True)
for row in ds.take(5):
    print(row["doc_id"])

Acknowledgements

We thank the City of New York (@nycgov) and the Office of the Mayor of New York City (@NYCMayor) for making these records publicly available through the September 11 document release portal.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite it as:

@misc{rao2026sep11docs,
  author       = {Rao, Delip},
  title        = {NYC September 11 Document Release: A Snapshot of the City of New York's September 11 Document Portal},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/delip/sep11docs}},
  note         = {Snapshot of https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/ taken on 2026-09-09}
}