After 14 years, it’s getting harder to remember what the skyline in Lower Manhattan looked like before it was mutilated. The one person who will never forget the presence of the Twin Towers is performance artist Philippe Petit. On August 6, 1974, he and several friends snuck up to the top of both the North and South Towers in a mission that had been planned for months. They carried with them Petit’s wire-walking supplies, his balancing pole and a 400-pound reel of cable that would take them hours to shoot on a crossbow and secure between the towers. On the morning of the 7th, Petit walked between the towers. Multiple times.
SEE ALSO: Performance Artist Philippe Petit On Passion, Taking Risks and His Life On the Wire
Why? As Petit puts it in his lilting Parisian accent, “There is no why… When I see a beautiful place to put my wire, I cannot resist.” The story of the wirewalk is so fantastic that it reads like a fabulist’s dream. Even the cop who arrested Petit seems aglow with the magic of the day.
Mordicai Gerstein’s marvelous children’s book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers is the perfect way to learn about Petit’s walk. Director Robert Zemeckis read the book a few years ago and visualized a movie that could recreate the morning when a young man did the impossible, 110 stories above the ground. The new movie, The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, will first appear in 3-D on September 30. For those made nauseous by 3-D, the normal view appears on October 9.
