The famous flag raised over Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2001, flew for just hours that day, and hasn’t been seen since. And the whereabouts of the banner that filled in for the iconic stars and stripes — allegedly procured by the FDNY when the original disappeared — is a mystery, too.
“That is the million-dollar question,” said Michael Tucker, a director of the new CNN documentary, “The Flag.” “City Hall couldn’t give us a definitive answer. We tried to check with the city archives, they didn’t know. They said check with the 9/11 museum.”
But the National September 11 Memorial & Museum also didn’t know where the streamers were — neither flag is part of its collection.
The film, to air Wednesday at 9 p.m., attempts to uncover what happened to the flag that came to be a symbol of hope after the terrorist attacks.
Photographer Thomas Franklin’s shot of three firefighters raising Old Glory over the ruins of the World Trade Center was published around the world. It appeared on the front page of The New York Post on Sept. 13, 2001, and was eventually reproduced on a US postage stamp.
One of the firefighters in the photo grabbed the flag, along with its pole, off a yacht in the North Cove Marina near Ground Zero.
Firefighter Billy Eisengrein, the man on the right in the photograph, says he and his fellow Bravest had other things on their minds that day.
“It was literally over in just a few minutes,” he said in the documentary. “We found a spot and raised the flag. The three of us looked at each other, we looked at the flag, and that was that. We just felt that we had other things that needed to be accomplished right then.”
As the image of the impromptu ceremony gained fame, the Navy requested the flag. Thomas Von Essen, the city fire commissioner at the time, asked his firefighter brother to retrieve it.
Roddy Von Essen knew getting the flag would be a problem.
“We know the way that the firemen can be very possessive about things, and we didn’t know if they were just going to be happy to give that flag up,” he says in the film.
So he sent a representative from the FDNY press office — a man he remembers only as Gerard — to get the banner, he recalled.
“He came back, he had the flag,” he says. “He said, ‘This is the flag.’ We brought it over to the mayor.”
That flag was displayed at a Yankee Stadium prayer service on Sept. 23, 2001, and it was signed by Mayor Giuliani and Gov. Pataki.
Then the Navy sent the Stars and Stripes to fly over the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, which launched airstrikes against Afghanistan shortly after the attack. When the flag returned to New York, it was hoisted above City Hall.
A year after the attacks, the couple who owned the yacht from which the famed flag came, Shirley Dreifus and Spiros Kopelakis, wanted it back from City Hall to display at a fund-raiser. But when they opened the box with their alleged property, they instantly knew it was not their small, 3-by-5-foot standard.
“The flag was gigantic,” Dreifus told The Post. The couple filed a notice of intent to sue the city, but never went through with the action.
Attempts to get answers from City Hall went nowhere.
“They never did anything, and they don’t seem to care,” she said.
The couple sent the “fake” signed flag back to City Hall — where that one seems to have vanished as well. Despite filmmaker inquiries and calls from The Post, officials refuse even to say whether the city still has it.
For years, the assumption was that the original flag vanished after the image of it became famous, perhaps pilfered by someone who wanted to make a buck.
But the filmmakers tracked down video shot at Ground Zero on the night of Sept. 11, 2001: By 10:15 p.m., the flagpole was already bare.
Where the substitute flag procured by the FDNY came from is another mystery. Tucker thinks a first responder may have grabbed the famous original and still has it.
“If the real flag was to show up, then it would kind of be like the mother of all battles in typical New York style,” he said. “Whose flag is this, anyway?”