Towering Feat

By Andrea Appleton
POSTED DECEMBER 1, 2007

Standing before a rapt audience at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center last month, the two men seemed an unlikely pair. Guy Tozzoli, a contained gentleman with a low, gravelly voice and Philippe Petit, exuberant French magician, high wire artist, and self-described “outlaw.”

What unites this odd couple is by now the stuff of legend: Tozzoli was the Port Authority man who planned, built and operated the Twin Towers; Petit conquered the 140-foot-wide void between them.

On Aug. 7, 1974, Petit walked between the two buildings, 110 stories above the ground, on a cable the width of a thumb. He repeated this feat eight times, at one point even lying down on the wire, one leg swinging in the air. Often called “the artistic crime of the century,” Petit’s unauthorized performance, at the age of 24, captivated the world. It also endeared him to Tozzoli, though their relationship began with a white lie.

A capacity crowd packed into the basement room of the Visitor Center on Nov. 18, to hear first-hand how the two friends met, and about their distinctive relationships with the Twin Towers.

Tozzoli was the first to speak.

“It was the end of July, 1974, and one day a young man walked into my office,” he told the audience. “He said, ‘I’m a reporter for a French journal. I’d like to do a story about the World Trade Center.’ So I asked him his name and he says ‘Philippe Petit!’” Tozzoli looked over at Petit and smiled. The audience laughed, breaking into a round of applause.

 “He kept coming back day after day,” Tozzoli continued. “Very nice young man. And I thought later, he keeps asking me: ‘How do the towers move?’”

Petit spent six years planning the installation of the cable, and the walk itself. He observed construction workers entering the complex, noting the IDs and uniforms that gained them access. He and his accomplices acquired blueprints and read voraciously about the towers’ construction, rented surveying equipment to measure exact distances, and built a full-scale replica of the rooftops to practice shooting an arrow, with a fishing line attached, from one to the other. (Other methods they considered for sending the cable across the void were a fishing rod and a remote control airplane.)

Petit first conceived of the walk at age 18, when he encountered a newspaper article about the upcoming construction of the towers. “When I first fell in love with the towers,” Petit told the audience, “they were not born. So I saw them grow. And then, when they were of age…” He paused and made a sweeping motion with one index finger, drawing the high-wire in the air, “I married them!”

Petit seems to live in constant exhilaration, as if he had only just stepped off the wire, while Tozzoli, reserved, seemed content to let others have the limelight. But as the two men talked, it became clear that they have more in common than the Twin Towers. For one, their disdain for limitations.

 “[WTC architect Minoru Yamasaki] and I used to tangle from time to time,” Tozzoli told the audience. “He said, ‘Guy, you can’t build a building taller than 80 floors.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ And he said, ‘Because nobody does it.’ Well, I said, ‘I think you’re a genius and you’re gonna figure out how to build me the tallest towers in the world.’ And that’s how we came to have the Twin Towers.”

Tozzoli also conceived of the buildings’ unique elevator system, the first that required people to take two elevators to reach upper floors. And it was he who proposed that the city use the soil from the WTC excavation to widen the island, forming what is now Battery Park City.

Petit’s own creative contempt for boundaries is, of course, no secret. “If I see a sign that says Do Not Walk on the Grass, that’s exactly where I want to go!” he said, in describing his motivations for the walk. “We were not criminals. Well…yes, we were. But we were artistic criminals. We were not stealing something. We were bringing something back to the world, a gift.”

For Tozzoli, that gift turned out to be quite literal. On the morning of the walk, a police officer contacted him by radio as he was driving to work, and told him there was a man on a tightrope between the two towers. “I thought, my God, this is magnificent!” Tozzoli said. “If he doesn’t kill himself, we’re going to have a picture on the front page of every newspaper in the world!” As it turned out, he was right.

Immediately after the 45-minute walk, drawing a crowd of thousands below, Petit was arrested and taken to Beekman-Downtown Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Next he was escorted to the 1st Precinct (where he delighted reporters by picking the lock on his handcuffs and balancing an officer’s cap on his nose) and finally thrown into jail. It was Tozzoli who engineered his release hours later. The punishment? He had to perform a high-wire act for the public, across a lake in Central Park.

 “And we’ve been friends ever since,” said Tozzoli.

The floor was opened up to questions.

 “How did it feel, like, to climb between the towers?” asked a little girl in a pink coat.

 “Well, I didn’t climb, young lady. I walked,” responded Petit. “And how did I feel? I feel like I was no longer human. I was feeling half-human and half-bird.”

But despite his famous stunt, and his less well-known high-wire performances—including at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—Petit told the audience he does not consider himself a wire walker.

“I also do drawings, I write books, I study languages, I play chess, I love to study French wines. I tell you this just to share with you my passions. For me, these things are as dangerous. I put all my life there.” (Petit is also currently building a barn by himself, using 18th-century tools and methods.)

A 6-year-old boy named John posed the one, perhaps inevitable, question. “How did you feel on 9/11 when the towers collapsed?” he asked. “Both of you?”

Tozzoli described his efforts to drive into the city from his home in New Jersey on the morning of Sept.11, 2001. “I came to the entrance of the Holland Tunnel,” he said, “and I saw smoke coming out of Tower 1. My first reaction was the poor people who are above that, they’re gonna have a lot of trouble getting out.” Tozzoli eventually had to give up and make his way home, leaving behind the towers to which he’d devoted 40 years of his life.

Petit, normally so voluble, said only: “I have to be very honest with you. I cannot answer that question. From my gut, I would share with you my love for, not two human beings—though for me, they were alive—but my love for two towers. Because of the human tragedy, I would not share with you my pain.”

With the Twin Towers gone, Tozzoli remains president of the World Trade Centers Association, a non-profit with the mission of promoting peace and stability through trade. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

 “You can’t believe the things that you can do once you start something like this,” he said.

Petit agreed.

“The art of living is not to do miracles every Tuesday,” he said. “But if you set yourself with passion onto anything, you cannot do anything but succeed.”

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