On the morning of August 7, 1974, a Port Authority police sergeant named Charles Daniels was sent up to the roof of the World Trade Center to bring a man down off a cable strung between the two towers, a quarter of a mile up in the air. What he found was not a man in trouble. “I observed the tightrope ‘dancer,’” Daniels said afterward, “because you couldn’t call him a ‘walker.’” The man was about halfway across, and on seeing the police he started to smile, and to laugh, and went into a dancing routine on the wire. When he came in toward the building they asked him to get off; he turned around instead and ran back out to the middle, and began to bounce—his feet leaving the wire and settling back onto it—and there was nothing the officers could do about it, because between them and him was open air, and thirteen hundred and fifty feet of fall.
The man was Philippe Petit, a twenty-four-year-old Frenchman, and he would stay on the wire for forty-five minutes. By the count recorded that day, he crossed eight times. He never wore a harness, a net, or anything that would catch him.
A page torn from a magazine
The story Petit told for fifty years began in 1968, when he was eighteen, sitting in a dentist’s waiting room in Paris with a toothache, leafing through a magazine. He came across an architectural drawing of two enormous towers planned for Lower Manhattan, taller than anything yet built. He tore the page out and walked out of the office, toothache forgotten, and from that morning the towers belonged to him in a way they did not yet belong to anyone, because they did not yet exist. It is a perfect origin, and fifty years later, at his anniversary show in 2024, Petit said he had made it up—”a complete invention,” along with the tidy six and a half years of planning that always went with it. He had spent a long time embellishing the only part of the story that could be embellished. Everything that happened on the roof was witnessed.
Petit was not a daredevil in the carnival sense. He was a self-taught wire-walker who had also learned to juggle, ride a unicycle, and pick locks, and who busked in the streets of Paris for the coins passersby would drop. He had a sense of his own work as art, and a low opinion of being told no. By the time he fixed on the towers he had already done two walks that made him notorious in Europe. In June 1971 he strung a cable between the towers of Notre-Dame and walked above the heads of the crowd that gathered in the square below, juggling as he went. Two years later he crossed between the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Both times he was arrested. Both times the arrest was part of the point.
The World Trade Center was a different order of problem. The towers were still going up through the early 1970s; the north tower topped out in 1970, the south a year later. Petit followed their construction from across the ocean, gathering everything he could—photographs, blueprints, measurements of the gap, the height, the way the buildings would sway in wind. He called the operation le coup. He assembled accomplices, some of them old friends from France, some Americans recruited in New York, and he prepared the way you would prepare a heist, because in every practical sense that is what it was.
Getting in
The crucial recruit was a man named Barry Greenhouse, an American who worked on the eighty-second floor of the south tower, at the New York State Insurance Department, and who, won over by the sheer audacity of the plan, became the inside man. He helped the team understand the building’s rhythms—when deliveries came, where the freight elevators ran, how the unfinished upper floors went dark and empty at night. Petit and his collaborators forged identification, posed as construction workers and architects and journalists, and made repeated trips up into the towers to photograph and measure and rehearse the logistics of carrying a quarter-ton of steel cable to the roof without being stopped.
On the night of August 6, the team split between the two towers and rode freight elevators up through the dark buildings with their equipment. They were dressed as workmen. At one point a guard came through, and Petit and one of the others lay flat under a tarpaulin on a beam above an elevator shaft, not moving, for what felt like an eternity, until the man left.
The cable still had to be gotten across the gap. To send the first thin line over, they used a bow and arrow, smuggled up in a cardboard tube of the kind that carries blueprints—the rigger Jean-Louis Blondeau shot an arrow trailing a fishing line from the north tower toward the south, across a hundred and forty feet of nothing, in the dark. The shot went long. The arrow came down on a beam of a metal truss that sloped away below the roof, and Petit had to climb down after it in the dark to get the line back. Once the fishing line was across, they used it to pull over progressively heavier ropes, and finally the cable itself, a steel wire that weighed about four hundred and fifty pounds. The cable sagged and sank under its own weight as it went, and the team had to haul it back up by hand, hour after hour, sweating in the dark. They rigged guy-lines—cavalettis—out to the sides to steady the wire and keep it from swinging in the wind that funneled between the buildings. By the time the rig was tensioned and ready, the night was nearly gone and the men were exhausted.
The wire
A little after seven, with the morning light coming up over the harbor and the streets of Lower Manhattan beginning to fill, Petit took hold of his balancing pole—twenty-six feet long, some fifty-five pounds of steel to settle his center and slow any wobble—and put one foot out onto the cable. Then he shifted his weight off the building and onto the wire, and he was out over the gap, walking.
From below, in the gathering crowd on the streets, he was a tiny dark figure against the white sky between the two pale towers, impossible at first to believe in. People stopped on the sidewalks and looked up and pointed. Traffic snarled. A traffic helicopter came over to look. The word spread down through the financial district that there was a man up there, on a wire, between the buildings.
He did not simply cross and get off. He crossed, and turned at the far edge, and came back. He knelt on the wire and rose again. He lay down on his back on the cable with the pole resting across him and looked up at the sky and the gulls. He walked to the center and stood and looked out over the city, and at one point, by his own account, he felt something close to peace—the strange private quiet of being exactly where he had wanted to be for years, with nothing left to do but be there.
The police, by now, were on both roofs, leaning against the steel and shouting at him to come in. They had no way to reach him. One officer threatened to send a helicopter to pluck him off the wire. Each time Petit walked toward one of the towers and the waiting officers, he stopped, turned, and walked back out over the gap, away from them, prolonging it. Eight crossings, the reports said, and eight is the number that has followed the story ever since; fifty years later Petit himself said it had really been six, or maybe four, and that his memory of it had gone soft.
“Man on wire”
What finally ended it was the weather. A light rain began to fall, and the cable grew slick, and Petit decided, as he put it, that he had “trespassed long enough into these forbidden regions.” He walked back to the south tower and stepped off the wire into the hands of the police, who handcuffed him on the roof and read him his rights. His accomplices were arrested too.
On the official police complaint, in the box for describing the offense, an officer wrote three words: man on wire. Decades later those words would become the title of the documentary that told the story.
Petit was taken in, sent to a downtown hospital for a psychiatric examination, and booked for criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct. The case landed with the Manhattan district attorney, and here the story turned, because the city, and the country, had fallen for him. The morning’s stunt had been splashed across the front pages. The towers had been badly reviewed from the start—the Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable had called them big buildings but not great architecture—and New Yorkers tended to regard them as a pair of charmless filing cabinets dropped into the skyline. It has been said ever since that the walk was the thing that changed that: he had given the buildings a story.
The district attorney dropped the charges. In exchange, Petit agreed to give a free performance for the public—a wire-walk in Central Park, over Belvedere Lake, for an audience that included a great many children. He called it the most beautiful sentence he could have been given.
Reporters kept asking him the same question in the days afterward, the question Americans especially could not let go of: why. Why would a man risk his life to walk on a wire between two buildings he had no permission to touch, for no prize and no purpose anyone could name. Petit found the question almost incomprehensible. There was no why. “When I see three oranges, I juggle,” he said. “When I see two towers, I walk.”
The towers stood for twenty-seven more years. They came down on a September morning in 2001, in a way no one watching the small figure on the wire in 1974 could have imagined. For forty-five minutes, near the very beginning of their life, one man had the space between them entirely to himself, and gave it back.