Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Philippe Petit and the World's Greatest Tightrope Walk (Encore)

Episode Date: September 24, 2022

On the morning of August 7, 1974, the people of New York City woke up to witness one of the most incredible sights that the city had ever seen.  Between the two towers of the New York World Trade Center, 1,350 feet off of the ground, was a man who was waking on a wire. It was audacious. It was dangerous. It was also totally illegal.  Learn more about Philippe Petit and the artistic crime of the century on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. On the morning of August 7, 1974, the people of New York City woke up to witness one of the most incredible sites that the city has ever seen. Between the two towers of the New York World Trade Center, 1,350 feet off the ground, was a man who was walking on a wire. It was audacious, it was dangerous, and it was also totally illegal. Learn more about Philippe Petit and the artistic crime of the century on this episode of Everything Everything, What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. If the events of August 7th, 1974 hadn't occurred, if people hadn't seen it with their own eyes, and if we didn't have documented evidence that it happened, the story might be written off as fiction. The story actually began years earlier in 1968. If you remember back to my episode on the World Trade Center, construction of the North Tower began in 1968 and of the South Tower in 1969. Born in France in 1949, Philippe Petit was a street performer. He wrote a unicycle, juggled, and did a street wire balancing act.

He took his first steps on a high wire when he was 16 years old and was trained by the legendary aerialist and circus performer, Rudy Omanowski. In 1968, a 17-year-old Philippe Petit was sitting in the waiting room of a dentist's office and saw an article in a magazine about the construction of the two World Trade Center buildings. When completed, they would be the tallest buildings in the world. According to Petit, the idea of walking between the two towers came to him immediately when he saw a photo of the two proposed buildings. He faked a sneeze, tore the photo out of the magazine, rushed out of the dentist's office, and began what would be six years of planning. There was a an enormous amount that went into the planning for what Petit had dubbed Le Cou. For starters,

Petit wasn't at that point a very experienced tightrope walker. He came up with the idea for the world's most audacious high wire walk a little over a year after he first learned how to walk on a wire. So much of the next several years simply was practicing his craft and getting more experience. The other thing was physically planning for how he was going to pull off Lecoo. There were a host of technical issues that had to be solved. For starters, he couldn't do this alone. He needed a team of people to help him pull this off. There were two towers, and he needed people on the top of each tower to assist in setting up the cable. Second, he needed to figure out a way to stretch the cable between the two towers. The distance between the towers was 138 feet or 42 meters.

That much steel cable is really heavy, and stretching it between two buildings over 1,300 feet up in the air is really challenging. The total weight of the cable was 450 pounds or 200 kilograms. Third, he had to figure out a way to attach guy wires, known as Cavaletti, to the building. Guy wires would normally be offset from the main wire vertically and horizontally, but that wouldn't be possible as everything had to be horizontal and attached to the roof. Fourth, he had to compensate from the movement of the buildings. Both buildings were designed to sway slightly in the wind. With the weight of the wire, there was a possibility of it snapping if it wasn't set up properly.

Finally, he had to get all of this gear up to the top of the building, and a second team up to the top of the other building without anyone finding out. Over the next several years, he acquired a group of accomplices to help him pull off Le Coup. He engaged in several practice stunts prior to the World Trade Center attempt. In 1971, he and an accomplice snuck into the towers of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and strung a wire between them. They started by throwing a juggling ball wrapped in fishing line between the towers, and then used that to pull a rope, which then pulled a cable.

A crowd assembled while there was an ordination service for new priests going on inside. This was highly illegal, and he was arrested after he got down. In 1973, he pulled another illegal high-wire walk when he walked between the north pylons of the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia. After the World Trade Center towers were opened, he made several scouting missions to New York to gather more information on the towers. He would wear various disguises to scout the tower and to take photos, sometimes dressing like a tourist, sometimes like an architect, and he even posed as a job.

journalist from the French architectural magazine Metropolis. In preparation back in France, he strung a wire which was the approximate distance he'd have to walk in New York and had his friends shake the wire as much as possible while he was walking on it to simulate the buildings moving and the wind blowing. As operations moved to New York to prepare for Le Cou, he recruited several Americans as accomplices. One in particular was an American by the name of Barry Greenhouse. Greenhouse actually recognized Petit when Petit was on one of his reconnaissance missions to the towers. Greenhouse was actually in the crowd during his 1971 tightrope walk of the Notre Dame Cathedral

and saw the subsequent media coverage. Greenhouse just happened to work on the 82nd floor of the South Tower for the New York State Department of Insurance. Greenhouse became their inside man and was able to get them ID badges and access to the building. The solution they came up with to get the wire across was to use a bone arrow with a fishing string attached to the arrow. The fishing line was then attached to a small rope, which was then attached to the steel cable. On the evening of August 6th, they managed to sneak their equipment up to the 104th floor right away, even though the plan was only to get to the 82nd floor. They suffered a huge delay when a guard came up to their floor, and they had to hide under a tarp.

The tarp covered an open elevator shaft, and they had to sit on an eye beam suspended above the shaft for several hours. Eventually, the guard left, and they got to work. Over at the other building, one of the team members freaked out because he thought he'd get caught and left in the middle of the setup. They had other problems as well. They couldn't find the arrow in the fishing line at first, and when they found it, the wire actually fell down the side of one of the buildings and had to get pulled up by the rope. They were behind schedule, but they managed to have everything set up and in place just after sunrise, and without anyone noticing. A little after 7 a.m., Philippe Petit set foot on the wire to begin his historic walk. Soon after he began,

his accomplices, which were down below with binoculars, saw him and began to notify everyone on the street. At first, he set out just to accomplish the primary goal. Walk across a wire between the World Trade Center buildings. He did that and stepped on to the other building. However, having accomplished Le Coo, he then went back out on the wire, and he didn't just cross the wire. He knelt down on the wire to salute the people assembled 400 meters or 1,312 feet below him. He laid down on his back on the wire, and he even danced a little bit on the wire. Eventually, the police made it to the rooftop of both towers. a traffic helicopter that was flying overhead to report on what was happening. The police goaded him to get off the wire, but every time he approached one of the buildings,

he would just turn around and walk back. Over the course of 45 minutes, he crossed the wire a total of eight times. Eventually, he hopped off the wire as it was starting to rain, and he was arrested and put into custody, as were his accomplices on the roof. While he was arrested, nobody was really mad at him. The police officers had respect for what he had done, as did everyone else who saw his performance. The New York City District Attorney decided not to press charges on the condition that he give a free performance for children in Central Park, which he was more than happy to do. Perhaps most importantly, he totally changed the perception of the World Trade Center among New Yorkers. Prior to Le Cou, the buildings were often thought of as an eyesore. Afterward,

the perception of the buildings became more positive, and New Yorkers took more pride in them and accepted them as their own. The owners of the World Trade Center gave Philippe Teet, a lifetime pass to the observation deck, and he even signed the steel beam where he started his walk. Once the walk and all the tree precautions were over, Petit decided to stay in New York City. He became an artist and residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a position he still holds today in his 70s. He performed several other significant high wire acts in his career.

He walked up an incline wire to the second level of the Eiffel Tower in 1989. He also did walks over the Niagara River and a section of the Grand Canyon. His 1974 walk was the subject of an award-winning 2008 documentary called Man on Wire, and he served as the advisor to the 2015 film The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon Levitt, as Petit. Almost 50 years after it happened, Philippe Petit's audacious and illegal crossing of the World Trade Center Towers remains the most famous highwire performance in history, and it has rightfully earned its reputation as the artistic crime of the century. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast.

And the associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener, Janellum, over at Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, learn something new every day. I'm so glad I found this podcast. I love how each episode is well crafted and concise, while the show covers a wide range of topics. I share an episode with someone I think will appreciate it at least once a week. Well, thank you, Janellam. By sharing episodes with people you know you are fighting the good fight,

and one person at a time making the world a better place. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show. It started out as another routine morning for a New York helicopter traffic reporter, but he had more to tell his radio listeners than how the traffic was on the West Side Highway. Feeling in my stomach right now because I'm at, let's see, 1,500 feet. And up here at 1,500 feet or in that area, there is somebody out there in a tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade.