Robert De Niro on helping revive Lower Manhattan after 9/11 — September 6, 2026 / 10:08 AM EDT
/ CBS News
Film legend Robert De Niro has lived or worked in Lower Manhattan for years. "You know, the East Side is another world to someone like me who's Lower Manhattan," he said.
So, for De Niro, the attacks on 9/11 hit especially close to home: "I was just about to fly to California. I was at a meeting in Midtown, and instead of going to the airport, I came back down here, and saw the tower, the North Tower, the smoke coming out, and so on. And then saw the South Tower fall. I couldn't believe, I couldn't believe it. I looked to my left where I have a big television and so confirmed it on CNN."
"You had to look on the TV to confirm what you were seeing?" I asked.
"What I was seeing with my own eyes, yeah! It was weird."
And in the weeks that followed, he saw his old neighborhood become a ghost town. "The thing I remember most is, right up here it was with the dust that was wet down, as I say, every day, every few hours maybe, with the sanitation water trucks to keep that stuff down."
In fact, most of Lower Manhattan was covered in the dust from nearby Ground Zero, a poisonous plague that drifted through the air, and into people's homes and lungs. De Niro taped up his windows, worried that the dust was toxic. Which it was.
But when the dust finally began to settle, De Niro and his longtime business partner, producer Jane Rosenthal, started to look for ways to pull Lower Manhattan out of the ashes.
Rosenthal said, "As a mother of two little girls. I was scared: What's going to happen again? I mean, it's all those feelings. But it's also like, okay, how can we help? If we can help, if we can do something, then something good will come of it."
They'd kicked around the notion of starting a film festival in Tribeca before, but after 9/11, it took on a new urgency as a way to help heal a shattered city.
In May 2002, only eight months after the attacks, the very first Tribeca Film Festival opened, drawing big crowds and even bigger names, like Nelson Mandela.
De Niro said, "It just seemed like the right thing to do."
Rosenthal said, "How do you give your neighbors a hug and say, 'This is going to be okay?' How do you say to everybody, 'Okay, we need something to look forward to'?"
And for the 150,000-plus people who lined up for the first festival, that's exactly what it was.
De Niro says he never had a doubt: "I wasn't thinking, I was just being, We're going to do it."