flying without a net: philippe petit celebrates golden anniversary of le coup

Philippe Petit re-creates historic WTC walk at special event at St. John the Divine (photo by Nina Wurtzel)

Most people don’t go through life flying without a net, understandably preferring to remain safe and secure as they make choices about work, family, and health. However, some thrive on risk and danger, sometimes in the name of sheer fun.

On August 7, 1974, twenty-four-year-old Philippe Petit was arrested in Lower Manhattan for criminal trespass and disorderly conduct for pulling off an incredible, perilous stunt that went viral well before there was any kind of internet.

Half a century later, New York City mayor Eric Adams proclaimed August 7, 2024, to be Philippe Petit Day, in honor of the French daredevil and longtime New Yorker. To celebrate the anniversary, Petit organized “Towering!!,” a two-night special event at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, where he has been an artist-in-residence for more than four decades, performing there often.

Petit became an instant folk hero fifty years ago when he walked back and forth several times along a 131-foot-long steel cable he set up between the Twin Towers, 1,350 feet aboveground. Using a balancing pole and soft shoes, he sat down, laid across the cable, jumped, danced, and taunted the police until he finally surrendered. It was an unforgettable moment in my childhood, and for any New Yorker alive at the time, no matter what they thought of architect Minoru Yamasaki’s design of the giant matching structures.

Philippe Petit brought NYC to a standstill in 1974 WTC walk (photo courtesy Man on Wire)

The charges against Petit were ultimately dropped in exchange for his performing a high-wire act for children in Central Park. In addition, the Port Authority gave him a lifetime pass to the observation deck. Tragically, that pass lasted only as long as the towers stood. Meanwhile, Petit, who has never stopped having fun, turned seventy-five on August 13.

Petit began the forty-five-minute WTC walk at 7:00 in the morning, quickly bringing the city to the kind of standstill usually associated with blackouts and extreme weather events. On 9/11, he watched on television with friends as Manhattan again came to a standstill when the buildings he referred to as “my towers” were destroyed in terrorist attacks that took the lives of 2,977 innocent people. From that moment on, Petit called the former World Trade Center “our towers.”

I was fortunate to be at St. John the Divine on August 7, when Petit re-created his experience, joined by a talented, wide-ranging group of artists onstage and in the audience. The logo itself was extremely clever: the word “Towering,” in ever-increasing all-cap black letters, followed by two gray exclamation points, with a tiny white human figure balancing between them, set against a blue sky with a bird soaring by.

The seventy-five-minute show consisted of nineteen chronological scenes, with such titles as “Awakening,” “Walking the Red Tape,” “First Step,” “Arrest,” and “Rebellion.” Clarinetist Anat Cohen played while moving about the space and standing on columns in the nave. A candle procession set the tenor of the night. James Marsh, the director of Man on Wire, the award-winning documentary about Petit’s WTC walk, debuted a short film.

A recording of Jacques Brel singing “The Impossible Dream” from Man of la Mancha in French (“La quête”) evoked not only the nation of Petit’s birth but the song that was sung nightly, in English, by Brian Stokes Mitchell from his apartment window in March 2020 when the two-time Tony winner was battling Covid.

The entire evening was a celebration of New York and its resilience, attended by such celebs as Darren Aronofsky, Judy Collins, Griffin Dunne, Michael Imperioli, Nicole Miller, Shaggy, Drew Nieporent, and Forest Whitaker. “Malverne’s in the house!” I called out to Tony Danza, who like me was born in Brooklyn and whose family later moved to the small village of Malverne in Nassau County. “Malverne’s in the house!” he repeated.

Cohen played George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Michael Miles and four young students from Ballet Tech, Mia Gosk, Quinn Walters, Prim Zimmerman, and David Zohar, danced like they were wire walking. Molly Lewis whistled familiar snippets along with sounds of seagulls. Pianist Evelyne Crochet played Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1.” Puppeteer Merlin Whitehawk manipulated a bird hovering by Petit as Shawn Conley played François Rabbath’s “Ma mère, Baidja” on double bass.

Sophie Auster presented her original composition “Flying Machine,” singing, “I’ve been dreaming of the skies, flying high, where the world is free.” Sting played “Fragile,” “Fields of Gold,” and the new “Let the Great World Spin,” written specifically for Petit. Tim Guinee and Lorenzo Pisoni reenacted the attempt by police to get Petit to come down from the wire, to slapstick effect as they were teasingly tormented by the aerial artist.

In “Confession,” Petit admitted that some of the folklore associated with Le Coup, as he calls his WTC walk, had been invented for maximum effect; it seems that he has a little bit of P. T. Barnum in him, ever the showman.

Over the course of the production, Petit traversed the wire set up in the nave numerous times, to silence, to live music, and while being chased by “cops.” The drop was several dozen feet and, as always with Petit, there was no net. In his half-century career, Petit has also walked the high wire without a net at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Louisiana Superdome, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Paris Opera, the Museum of the City of New York, the Eiffel Tower, locations in Jerusalem, Tokyo, Vienna, Frankfurt, Belgium, Switzerland, and in many US cities. In 1982, 1992, and 1996, he performed the feat at St. John the Divine. This latest walk was his one hundredth overall.

Philippe Petit walks high wire as Sting performs below (photo by PMC/Sean Zanni)

It’s breathtaking watching Petit do his thing, but it’s not necessarily frightening, unless you have a fear of heights. I am not acrophobic; my mother loved getting as close as possible to the edges of mountains and tall buildings, and I have followed in her footsteps. But when I first posted about the event, a bunch of my friends commented that they couldn’t even look at the famous photos of Petit at the Twin Towers, despite knowing that he survived fully intact.

Petit’s mastery of his art is remarkable and awe-inspiring; at St. John the Divine, you could see him contemplate every move, study his face as he risked life and limb to entertain us, and himself. It makes you want to be that good at something, anything. Everything.

Petit has no plans on retiring. This weekend he will be in the Hamptons with Cohen and Young Concert Artists Karen Lindquist and Anthony Trionfo for a “Garden Stroll” across the LongHouse Reserve pond on September 1. And on September 26, he will be at Montclair University for a Peak Performances screening of Man on Wire, followed by a Q&A.

“I will continue to perform, to walk, to dream,” Petit said at the end of the show, a challenge to each and every one of us to, at least sometimes, fly without a net.

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