Philippe Petit spent six years and more than two hundred trips to the site getting a 450-pound steel cable onto the roofs of the World Trade Center in the dark; the part anyone remembers took forty-five minutes and used nothing but a pole

By August 1974 the World Trade Center had been open more than a year, and New York had made up its mind about it. Ada Louise Huxtable had summed the design up in the Times while it was still a proposal: "the world's daintiest architecture for the world's biggest buildings." Lewis Mumford, in The Pentagon of Power in 1970, filed the project under purposeless giantism. Then the towers opened and put more office space into lower Manhattan than lower Manhattan had tenants for; the Port Authority was moving government agencies onto floors it could not otherwise let.

What nobody had done was look up.

A little after seven on the morning of the 7th, several thousand people on Church Street stopped and did, and a Frenchman who had been on the roof all night gave them forty-five minutes.

Six years of homework

Petit was eighteen when he found the towers. He was in a dentist's waiting room in Paris in 1968, reading about a building that did not exist yet, and he tore the page out.

The wire came later; the paperwork came first. He made more than two hundred visits to the site, noting which helmets the trades wore and what the delivery vans carried. He rented surveying gear and measured the gap from the ground. He went up in a helicopter to photograph the roofs, and talked his way onto the top floors as a reporter for a French architecture magazine while a friend photographed the anchor points behind him.

He also started a business. Fisher Industrial Fence Co. never existed, but its identity cards did, and they were good enough to get men and several hundred pounds of steel past a security desk. Barry Greenhouse, an insurance executive with an office in the complex, came in as the crew's inside man.

There were two rehearsals in public, both illegal. In June 1971 he strung a wire between the towers of Notre-Dame and walked it; in 1973 he did it again on the harbor bridge in Sydney. In a field in France he set up two hundred feet of cable, roughly the span he would need, and had friends haul on it while he crossed, because a building that tall moves and he wanted to know what that would feel like underfoot.

How the cable got across the gap

Two teams went in on the evening of August 6, dressed as workmen with the equipment signed in as a delivery. One rode a freight elevator up the south tower with the cable. The other carried a bow into the north tower inside a cardboard tube meant for blueprints. They stashed the gear nineteen steps below the roof and waited, and when guards came through they lay flat under tarpaulins in the dark and listened.

The first line was the problem, and Jean-Louis Blondeau solved it: put a fishing line on an arrow, shoot it across, then use it to pull a cord, then a rope, then the cable itself. The arrow went over. Finding it was harder, because nothing was visible on the far roof at that hour; Petit took his clothes off and worked along the parapet until the monofilament touched his skin.

Then the weight. The main cable ran to about 450 pounds, and once it started down it kept going, sagging far below the roofline into the space between the buildings. Hauling it back by hand took most of the night. Two guy lines, what riggers call cavalettis, went out at angles to stop the span from rolling. The wire was ready near dawn: an inch thick, 1,368 feet up, across a gap of roughly 138 feet.

The forty-five minutes

He picked up the balancing pole (twenty-six feet, fifty-five pounds, sagging at the tips to pull his center of gravity below the wire) and stepped off at about a quarter past seven.

He crossed eight times. Halfway out he knelt and saluted the people on the roof. Once he lay flat on the cable with the pole across his chest and looked straight up, a quarter of a mile above Lower Manhattan, while the traffic stopped underneath him.

Port Authority police reached both roofs and found they had nothing to do. Sergeant Charles Daniels wrote it up afterward in the flat voice of a man filing a report on something that does not fit a form. He had observed "the tightrope 'dancer' — because you couldn't call him a 'walker'" out at the halfway point; when the officers called him in, he laughed and went back out into the middle, bouncing, his feet leaving the wire and finding it again.

Rain came on and the cable got slick. That is what ended it, and not the shouting from either roof.

What he was charged with

They handcuffed him at the parapet and read him his rights. He was taken for psychiatric evaluation, which found nothing worth reporting, and booked for criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.

Richard Kuh, the Manhattan district attorney, dropped both. The condition was a free show for children in Central Park.

Petit's reading of "show" was generous. The office seems to have had juggling in mind; on August 29 he rigged six hundred feet of cable over Belvedere Lake and walked that instead. The Port Authority, whose building he had broken into, gave him a lifetime pass to the observation deck and let him sign a beam at the top.

What the record does not settle

Nearly all of the above comes from people describing, decades later, a night they spent hiding on a roof. Man on Wire got the surviving crew on camera in 2008, and Petit has told the story in print more than once. The versions do not agree on everything.

The start time is 7:15 in some accounts and "shortly after 8" in others. The gap is 130 feet in one account and 138 in another. The bow is a crossbow in a few retellings. Nobody filmed the walk, which is why the same handful of stills illustrates every version of it, including the ones that contradict each other.

The load-bearing facts are not in doubt. He was up there for the better part of an hour, the cable was real, and Daniels filed his report the same day.

Fifty years on

In 1980 Petit was arrested again, this time for walking a wire across the nave of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights. The dean's response was to name him artist-in-residence, a title he still holds. Two years later he rigged a cable 150 feet above Amsterdam Avenue, from a ledge over the rose window to an apartment house across the street, to open a new phase of the cathedral's construction.

On August 7, 2024 he crossed that nave again in a piece called Towering!!, with Sting on the bill and nineteen scenes drawn from his own life. It was his hundredth wire performance. He turned seventy-five six days later, and the mayor's office declared the date Philippe Petit Day.

The towers stood twenty-seven more years after that morning, and long before the end of them the daintiest-architecture line had stopped being the thing people said. Something in the city's opinion turned on a wire nobody had asked for, over a plaza New York had spent a decade complaining about. It cannot be done there again, and security is beside the point: One World Trade Center went up alone, and a wire has to be tied at both ends.

Sources

• PBS American Experience, "Tightrope Between the Towers," which quotes Sgt. Charles Daniels' report
• History.com, "When a French Daredevil Walked a Tightrope Between the Twin Towers"
• Time, "Philippe Petit Walks Between the Twin Towers: How He Did It" (2015)
• National September 11 Memorial & Museum, "Remembering Philippe Petit's Walk Between the Twin Towers"
• Wikipedia, "Philippe Petit," "Man on Wire" and "World Trade Center (1973–2001)"
• Untapped New York, "The NYC That Never Was: 1 WTC," for the Huxtable and Mumford criticism, and T:WINY, "Flying Without a Net," for the 2024 cathedral performance