| Fifty years ago today, New York City awoke to discover that a young Frenchman was walking across a tightrope between the Twin Towers. “Right at the tippy top,” a WCBS radio reporter said—a quarter of a mile in the air, with no net below. (“I have a very queasy feeling in my stomach right now,” he added.) The aerialist was the high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who was twenty-four years old and dressed like a cat burglar, clad entirely in black, down to his wire-walking slippers. Like a jewel thief, Petit was engaged in a stunt that was risky, high-stakes, and illegal. The performance, which lasted nearly an hour, was later celebrated by some as the “artistic crime of the century.” Petit had previously made a name for himself in Paris, where his wire-walking début comprised a trip between the twin towers of Notre-Dame. Three years later, atop lower Manhattan’s World Trade Center, he not only walked between the second tallest skyscrapers on the planet—he glided, danced, and sat, looking on as a seagull flew beneath him. (Down on the ground, a crowd cheered Petit, while reporters and cops gathered to interview or arrest him.) When the New Yorker contributor Gwen Kinkead returned with the artist to the Twin Towers, in 1987, she found a gnomic, beauty-oriented man drawn to the wire as the best place to be by himself. In the sky, “I am alone and in control,” he said, “as I am not on the ground.” | 
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