Stuntman walks world's longest slackline between mainland Italy and Sicily
Shortly after 7 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1974, French performance artist Philippe Petit stepped out from the roof of the World Trade Center’s South Tower and onto a one-inch thick cable, stretching 140 feet across to the North Tower.
Audacious, dangerous and entirely illegal, Petit’s wire walk was called the ‘artistic crime of the century’ and was years in the planning. Using covert surveillance and endless subterfuge, Petit managed to smuggle a huge amount of equipment up the 110 floors of the South Tower before his friend and collaborator, Jean-Louis Blondeau, fired a cable across to the North Tower using a bow and arrow.
On the morning of the attacks, Petit, who has never owned a television, was called into his neighbor’s house in the Catskills to watch the horror unfolding. “They said, ‘Your towers are being destroyed.’French high wire artist Philippe Petit takes a walk along the railing of one of the World Trade Center Towers high above New York City on July 14, 1986.“But all I could think about was the thousands of human lives, not the architectural devastation,” he recalled.
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