I could see people from the top of the Sears Tower.
Is this a whoosh?
Hey, people will believe anything.
But yes, basically this time and place was not the “recording all the time” type of society we now know, and the average tourist may have a snapshot camera or an 8mm *without *any sort of fancy zoom lens that would help litle.
In exchange for doing a free public performance for children. And he got a free lifetime pass to the observation deck.
They probably figured they’d have to release a couple dozen muggers and pushers to make room for those couilles of his at the Tombs. And that any copycats would be a very quickly self-correcting problem 
A lot of BBC shows from the 60s/70s did that. I think I first experienced it with old Tom Baker Doctor Who episodes on PBS.
In 1974, it would have been more like one of these.
My dad had one in his car.
Equipment to read the tape format is quite easy to create as a lab prototype… rig up a machine to do reel to reel… sit on the tape a magnetic head (still used in hard drives… just grab one of them hey ?) and connect that into a little circuit that biases the head, amplifies/adjusts the signal resulting, demodulate if you like, to be just right for an analog to digital convertor … which easily samples it far faster than required. Thereafter the computer program demodulates (if needed), converts it into lines, frames… having saved it as so many millions’s of frames (bitmaps of each frame) the job is done, thats a form of video… conversion to a format you know, such as mp4, is trivial
No intact full recording of the first Super Bowl exists despite the fact that it was simulcast by two different networks (NBC and CBS). It was the first NFL game to be broadcast on two different networks and the only Super Bowl (so far). Both networks wiped their tapes afterward.
NFL Films had a camera crew there to film plays and eventually stitched together a video showing each play, but even that isn’t the same as having a contiguous recording of the game with commentary. And for years (up until this year in fact) all we had available for posterity were highlights of the game.
British shows of the time (Fawlty Towers did it too) did this not only because, as I said video cameras & recording decks were cumbersome and power hungry, but also because it rains in Britain. A lot. And bad weather & early electronic video equipment don’t mix.
I assure you that whatever format was used to record the Apollo XI mission still exists… it’s just not in anyone’s studio rack any more. Collectors, old-school archivists, even museums… there’s a 2-inch tape player (or whatever) ready to take the reels right now. For one thing, that would be commercial gear, built like a Mercedes tank.
I had a friend who made lots of beer money by keeping a PC, ca. 1995, with every drive that far known to man and geek attached. He could move data off everything from magstripe cards to 8-inch floppy onto either a provided hard drive or 1.4 floppies. He got at least occasional commercial jobs from companies that discovered, for example, all their corporate minutes were stored on IBM DisplayWriter discs long after the last DW system went to the scrap heap.