by Craig Hatkoff

New York is a city of stories, and stories come in every size — six-second Vines (RIP), ten-minute Quibis (RIP), iPhone features, video games, AR/VR/MR, immersive and AI-made work, and whatever comes next. Tribeca has made room for most of them. The first year, the festival attracted 1,500 submissions, in part because of the short notice. This past festival drew almost 14,000. The mix of submissions reflects today’s rapidly changing media industry, but film is still the foundation, and whatever the platform, the job hasn’t changed: find the next generation of storytellers and give them a stage.

Everyone who helped build Tribeca — filmmakers and studios, the staff, sponsors and volunteers, and above all the audiences — has their own version of how it began and what it became over 25 years. The same events, a different camera. Call it the Rashomon effect. What follows is mine.

When Berry Welsh (executive producer) and Matt Tyrnauer (director) of Tribeca25 asked whether I had any interesting artifacts — photos, memos, emails, anything — I went into files that had sat untouched for a quarter of a century. Most of what I found made it to them in time. A few memos surfaced too late, buried deep in a Dropbox folder. They fill in dates and names that had become distant memories, blurred by the fog of time.

Here are a few fillers for the gaps in the record.

Dinner Downtown

Before there was a Dinner Downtown, there was a dinner… downtown — five of us, no captains, no press, no plan. The memo that came out of it is undated, but the file’s properties give it away: Wednesday, October 31, 2001. That pins the evening to Sunday, October 28. Jane and I, our daughter Juliana, Jon Patricof and Victoria Radford had gone to Little Italy to support restaurants that badly needed it. Quite simply, we had dinner downtown.

The memo, written three days later, says what happened next better than I could now:

Last Sunday we journeyed downtown to Little Italy for dinner to show our support for the local restaurants that have been financially devastated by the attacks on the World Trade Center. The cause is simply a sheer loss of business. But we were not prepared for the wave of emotion that swept over us as we walked down Mulberry Street at the peak of dinner hour. We peered through the front window of one restaurant after another. With only a handful of diners at a table or two in each restaurant they were all virtually empty. The looks on the faces of the idle waiters in search of customers to serve said it all. Their beckoning expressions became yet another indelible image from the aftermath of September 11th. Gone was the hustle and bustle of a different age.

As we stopped for dinner at one restaurant an idea almost invented itself — why don’t we get all of our friends to come downtown en masse and start a movement to help preserve our precious treasures of Little Italy, Chinatown and other wonderful neighborhood restaurants that help define why we are New Yorkers. No one would dispute that it would be an unacceptable loss if all these wonderful restaurants just suddenly disappeared. They don’t need our help — they just need our business! And they need it now.

Please join us next Wednesday evening as we descend upon downtown for dinner. We are inviting you to become a “dinner captain” and, in turn, invite ten couples to join along in this worthwhile effort.

That little dinner downtown on October 28th had led, in very short order, to what would become known as “Dinner Downtown” — the well-publicized viral campaign designed to get people back on the streets of lower Manhattan. Ten friends would each invite ten friends, and so on.

The memo went out on Wednesday October 31st; the first official Dinner Downtown was to be held on Wednesday November 7th. The goal for that first dinner? We were hoping a hundred or so friends would join us. Then something unexpected happened. Within 72 hours the ranks had swelled to almost 600 New Yorkers at 27 restaurants across Little Italy, Chinatown and Wall Street. Ten days from an empty Mulberry Street to one teeming with new energy and new customers. President Bill Clinton, Denis Leary, Queen Noor with Bob leading the parade in Chinatown. Something was happening…

The second Dinner Downtown followed within a couple of weeks, but I can’t find anything in my files. Someone may have additional artifacts to help fill in the gaps. As best I can recall I think about 1,000 people were at the second Dinner Downtown.

Somewhere in those weeks a group of firefighters organized by retired FDNY Lieutenant Vic Navarra came to us with a request. They wanted to host one — to thank New Yorkers for everything New Yorkers had been doing for them. The heroes wanted to say thank you.

The memo for the third Dinner Downtown, this time on letterhead from Bob, Jane and me, set it for Tuesday, December 18, 2001. Everyone would meet at 62 Mott Street, at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, at 5:00. A press conference at 5:15. At 5:30, a mini-parade down Mott Street — our children marching with a hundred firefighters, police officers, Port Authority and EMS workers and their families, and the dragons of Chinatown. Dinner at 6:00. Each restaurant would be co-hosted by a group of our 9/11 heroes. Madame Tussauds, Bacardi and Miramax Films picked up the tab for the heroes and their families; everyone else was Dutch treat, $30 an adult, $15 a child.

One line in that memo puts the reader in December 2001 faster than anything I could write today: “Please bring cash — many restaurants still don’t have phone service for credit cards.” Three months after the attacks, Chinatown couldn’t run a credit card.

The memo also made a promise. Starting right after the first of the year, Dinner Downtown would become a regular weekly event.

Twenty-nine days

Here is the part that surprises even me, reading it back. Rewind twelve days. By the time that memo went out, we had already announced a film festival. Between the first dinner on November 7 and a press conference on December 6, we pulled together enough of the pieces — a name, a neighborhood, a date in May — to stand up and say it out loud. Twenty-nine days. Then, twelve days after that, we were marching down Mott Street with the dragons of Chinatown, still promising weekly dinners.

Announcing a festival and building one are different things. After December 18 we all left for winter break, telling ourselves we’d figure it out in January. We did. The same people, the same neighborhoods and the same reflex — bring everyone downtown and give ‘em the business — went straight into the work. Four months later, on 120 days’ notice, the Tribeca Film Festival opened its doors. The dinner captains instead were now volunteers; the tables became screenings. Dinner Downtown never became weekly. It became Tribeca.

The duck

That’s the story the memos tell. Mine has one more thread, and it starts with a children’s book about tonsils.

Earlier in 2001, our daughter Juliana and I had published Good-bye Tonsils!, her first-person account, at age five, of going to the hospital and having her tonsils out. Her anxiety about having surgery was palpable. WE kept a journal and she drew illustrations; it seems creating a journal was mitigating the anxiety. Dr. Harold Koplewicz, who now runs the Child Mind Institute, wrote the foreword explaining to parents how to discuss a topic that was quite scary. The book became a New York Times bestseller because it filled a need: it gave parents a tool for talking with their child about something traumatic, something scary.

After September 11th, Harold needed another book — a tool to help parents begin to discuss something far scarier and more traumatic than a tonsillectomy. Harold told me that recovery from the collective trauma of 9/11 wasn’t going to be a sprint. It was going to be a marathon.

Parents across the city had no idea how to talk to their children about what had happened. So Juliana and I wrote Ladder 35, Engine 40, the story of her own week: being picked up early from the library, the walk home across Central Park, the questions, the sore throat she got when she was upset. And her wooden duck. And that’s where Lieutenant Vic Navarro entered the story.

Juliana had an old wooden duck piggy bank with her name painted on it. That Friday, September 14th, she decided to fill it — every coin she owned, plus whatever she could find in my coat pockets, plus my red-white-and-blue ribbon, which we nailed to the duck’s neck. She and Jane carried it around the corner to the firehouse, where the letters over the door said Ladder 35, Engine 40. A quarter of that company’s men were missing. Recently retired, Vic Navarra had come back to help out at the Firehouse. He saw Juliana out of the corner of his eye.

As he knelt, holding back his tears, to hug a very serious six-year-old holding a duck, a Daily News photographer said, “that’s the one,” and the picture ran that Sunday. This was same Vic Navarra who would soon organize Dinner Downtown with 100 Heroes.

Vic had a second job. For twenty years he had been the Official Starter for the New York City Marathon, and on the morning of September 11th his mind had been on a race eight weeks away. As Jane and Juliana told me about what had happened at the Firehouse I decided to go meet Vic. That’s when he told me about his role in the Marathon that was going forward despite Sept 11th. He asked me if Juliana would like to come join him to start the Marathon.

On the morning of November 4, 2001, our whole family traveled to Staten Island. There on the Verrazzano Bridge Juiana joined Vic and watched 30,000 runners set off for Manhattan. For the first time, the Twin Towers no longer stood out on the skyline. They looked at the Statue of Liberty seemed to be looking for her missing friends.

Three days later, 600 people went joined us for the first official Dinner Downtown.

Harold Koplewicz’s metaphor had come full circle. His forward in Ladder 35, Engine 40 was a reprise: healing our children would not be a sprint. It would be a marathon. And in the book’s last chapter, Juliana wondered what would happen if a lot of other kids filled up their piggy banks and brought them to firehouses too. A little idea, and then everybody invites everybody. She had figured out how to do it before we did.

We thought Tribeca was a sprint. It turned out to be a marathon. Twenty-five years later Goodbye Tonsils! is still going strong. Twenty-five years later so is Tribeca. The marathon continues.

Epilogue: On December 30, 2007, Vic Navarra died of sinus cancer he had contracted while working on the pile at the World Trade Center site.