“Don’t try anything funny, sir,” a security official in a pinstripe suit said, waving Philippe Petit through a turnstile in the lobby of 3 World Trade Center.
It was a joke. Petit was returning to the scene of what, 50 years ago, was a crime, or as close to the scene as he can get now.
On Aug. 7, 1974, he walked on a cable that had been strung — illicitly — between the World Trade Center towers. The New York Times said he combined “the cunning of a second-story man with the verve of an Evel Knievel,” promenading, prancing and pirouetting a quarter-mile above the ground. (The disorderly conduct and trespass charges were quickly dropped.)
Now Petit, the man in the 2008 Academy Award-winning documentary “Man on Wire,” was on an excursion into memory — the memory of a day when New York was consumed with his high stepping, or at least distracted from other news. The Times’s front page on Aug. 8 was dominated by articles about President Richard Nixon’s imminent resignation because of the Watergate scandal.
This time he was wearing a shirt with a button-down collar — unbuttoned — and light gray slacks. Back then, he and his friends put on construction helmets as they sneaked his cables and rigging equipment to the top of the north tower in 1974. They shot an arrow from one building to the other and strung the cable he stepped out on.
“I felt like all New York was looking at me — the entire world, in a way — so I feel like Leonardo di Caprio in a ‘Titanic’ scene, like I am the king of the world, you know,” he said. “It was a childish yet profound moment.”
He remembered “when I grabbed the pole and put my first foot on the cable, not knowing if I would have the guts to bring my second foot up.”
He remembered looking down at people who looked up, and looking out at “the beautiful line of the horizon that was slightly, slightly curved.”
Petit was standing on the 80th floor of 3 World Trade Center, a building completed in 2018, 44 years after his famous walk. Later he retraced his route — on the ground this time, between the two memorial pools that cover the space where the north and south towers stood until Sept. 11, 2001.
Petit has been preparing for an anniversary show called “Towering!!” — with two exclamation points; “You see in them the two towers,” he said. He will stage “Towering!!” at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Aug. 7 and Aug. 8.
For the performances, he will be joined by friends he has made since becoming famous, among them the musician Sting. Petit said there would be 19 scenes in “Towering!!” including an arrest scene — “which will be almost comic, Keystone Kops, you know.”
“Towering!!” will not be an exact recreation of what unfolded that morning in 1974. The twin towers are gone, and this time he will be only 20 feet off the ground, well below where he was then — or where he was in 1980, on his first walk at the cathedral, across the 601-foot-long nave. That trip, also illicit, led to another arrest. That time, he has said, the dean of the cathedral at the time, the Rev. James Parks Morton, “took me out of the police handcuffs” and named him artist in residence, a title he still holds.
Why not go higher for the anniversary shows?
“I have nothing to prove at 75 years old, short a couple of weeks,” he said. (His birthday is on Aug. 13.)
Besides, he said, he does not want people to see him as a dot in the air, as they did that morning in 1974.
“Then you don’t see me,” he said. “You don’t see my face, you don’t see my expression, you don’t see my hands, you don’t see my feet. I have been a dot in the sky in New York. It’s a nice thing for New Yorkers to have a vision of the twin towers walk where you can see what I’m doing — ‘Oh, my God, he’s smiling.’”
Weather
Expect sunshine with temperatures in the low 90s, with a chance of showers in the afternoon. Tonight, showers are likely, and thunderstorms are possible, as temperatures drop to the low 70s.
Trump can talk about witnesses who testified against him
The judge who oversaw Donald Trump’s criminal trial relaxed a gag order covering what Trump can say about the proceeding, freeing the former president to criticize witnesses who testified against him.
The decision by Justice Juan Merchan came two days before a scheduled debate between Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and President Biden. Merchan’s ruling means that Trump can once again attack his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, or Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who said Cohen had paid her to keep quiet about a sexual encounter with Trump.
Hours after Merchan issued the five-page decision, Trump referred to it in a fund-raising appeal that echoed his baseless claims that the outcome of the trial had been predetermined. “I’m finally FREE to talk about the RIGGED trial that convicted me in New York,” he wrote, adding that the decision had come “JUST IN TIME FOR MY DEBATE WITH CROOKED JOE.”
Trump can now complain broadly about the jury that convicted him. Merchan said that “while it would be this court’s strong preference” to continue restrictions on comments about the jury, he felt that the law compelled him to loosen them. But Trump remains subject to a separate order barring him from making the jurors’ identities public or attacking them by name. “There is ample evidence to justify continued concern for the jurors,” Merchan wrote.
Merchan imposed the gag order before the trial began, after Trump berated Cohen, the prosecutors and the Manhattan jury pool, which leans heavily Democratic. Trump violated the order 10 times, running up $10,000 in fines, before the jury convicted him on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
The charges involved a $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels by Cohen during the 2016 campaign. Trump then falsified the records to conceal reimbursement to Cohen. Trump has denied that he had sex with Daniels.
Cohen, in a statement after the ruling, played down its significance, saying that Trump had spent years “making constant negative statements about me.” He added that the former president’s “failed strategy of discrediting me so that he can avoid accountability didn’t work then and won’t work now.”
Trump, who is to be sentenced on July 11, faces up to four years in prison, though Merchan could impose a sentence of probation or home confinement.
METROPOLITAN diary
Beethoven on the M4
Dear Diary:
I was on the M4 bus on the way to a class at Manhattan School of Music when I was a student there some years ago.
I was studying the score to Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata as the bus made its way uptown. It was a piece I had been studying for some time.
I couldn’t help noticing that a man who was sitting across the aisle kept looking at me. As he got up to get off the bus, he turned to me.
“Watch out for those octaves in the last movement,” he said. “They are really tricky.”
— Christopher Bliss
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
