Fifty Years Later, Philippe Petit Is Still a ‘Man on Wire’

It was 50 years ago this week that Philippe Petit defied gravity, and the police, by walking a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, braving the winds some 1,350 feet above the streets of Manhattan.

Petit, who will turn 75 next week, still has enviable balance, as was clear the other day when he ascended a simple metal ladder to reach what looked like a short diver’s platform 20 feet off the ground. A wire stretched out before him. Taking hold of a balancing pole, he stepped into the air, striding gracefully as if he were on solid ground — pausing only occasionally to assert his balance against the wire rolling underfoot.

“People think in old age you cannot do anything anymore,” he said in an interview. “I think it’s the opposite. I think I’m more majestic, more in control, more beautiful to look at today at 74 than I was at 18.”

He was inside the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine rehearsing “Towering!!,” a new show he will perform there on Wednesday and Thursday to commemorate the anniversary of his walk between the twin towers (which the two exclamation points in the show’s title suggest). The feat made Petit a national fascination. It took on a tragic dimension after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, destroyed the towers. Since then, new generations learned about his accomplishment through the Academy Award-winning documentary “Man on Wire” (2008) and a children’s book, “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.”

The cathedral, in Morningside Heights in Upper Manhattan, is a special place for Petit: He has been an artist in residence there since 1980. The dean of the cathedral at the time, Rev. James Parks Morton, granted Petit the title to stop the police from arresting him after an illicit high-wire walk across its 601-foot-long nave. Two years later, he walked across Amsterdam Avenue to the cathedral to inaugurate a new phase of construction.