Philippe Petit (French pronunciation: [filip pəti]; born 13 August 1949) is a French highwire artist who gained fame for his unauthorized highwire walks between the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1971 and of Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1973, as well as between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on 7 August 1974.
Since then, Petit has lived in New York, where he has been artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, another site of his aerial performances. He has done wire walking as part of official celebrations in New York, across the United States, and in France and other countries, as well as teaching workshops on the art. In 2008, Man on Wire, a documentary directed by James Marsh about Petit's walk between the towers, won numerous awards including the 2009 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The Walk, a film based on Petit's walk, was released in September 2015, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit and directed by Robert Zemeckis. Petit was also the subject of a children's book and an animated adaptation of it, released in 2005.
He also became adept at equestrianism, juggling, fencing, carpentry, rock-climbing, and bullfighting. Spurning circuses and their formulaic performances, he created his street persona on the sidewalks of Paris. In the early 1970s, he visited New York City, where he frequently juggled and worked on a slackline in Washington Square Park.
Petit was born in Nemours, Seine-et-Marne, France; his father Edmond Petit was an author and an Army Pilot. At an early age, Petit discovered magic and juggling. He loved to climb, and at 16, he took his first steps on a tightrope wire. He told a reporter,
Within one year, I taught myself to do all the things you could do on a wire. I learned the backward somersault, the front somersault, the unicycle, the bicycle, the chair on the wire, jumping through hoops. But I thought, "What is the big deal here? It looks almost ugly." So I started to discard those tricks and to reinvent my art.
In June 1971, Petit secretly installed a cable between the two towers of Notre-Dame de Paris. On the morning of 26 June 1971, he "juggled balls" and "pranced back and forth" as he crossed the wire on foot to the applause of the crowd below.
Petit became known to New Yorkers in the early 1970s for his frequent tightrope-walking performances and magic shows in the city parks, especially Washington Square Park. Petit's most famous performance was in August 1974, conducted on a wire between the roofs of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, New York City, 400 metres (1,312 feet) above the ground. He performed for 45 minutes, making eight passes along the wire, during which he walked, danced, lay down on the wire, and saluted watchers from a kneeling position. Office workers, construction crews, and policemen cheered him on.
Petit conceived his "coup" when he was 18, when he first read about the proposed construction of the Twin Towers and saw drawings of the project in a magazine he read in 1968 while sitting at a dentist's office.
What was called the "artistic crime of the century" took Petit six years of planning. During this period, he learned everything he could about the buildings and their construction. In the same period, he began to perform highwire walking at other famous places. Rigging his wire secretly, he performed as a combination of circus act and public display. In 1971, he performed his first such walk between the towers of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, while priests were being ordained inside the building. In 1973, he walked a wire rigged between the two north pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
In planning for the Twin Towers walk, Petit had to learn how to accommodate issues such as the swaying of the high towers due to wind, which was part of their design; effects of wind and weather on the wire at that height; how to rig a 200-foot (61 m) steel cable across the 138-foot (42 m) gap between the towers (at a height of 1,368 feet (417 m)); and how to gain entry with his collaborators, first to scope out the conditions and lastly to stage the project. Petit and his collaborators had to bring heavy equipment to the rooftops. He traveled to New York on numerous occasions to make first-hand observations.
Since the towers were still under construction, Petit and one of his collaborators, New York-based photographer Jim Moore, rented a helicopter to take aerial photographs of the buildings. Two more collaborators, Jean François Heckel and Jean-Louis Blondeau, helped him practice in a field in France, and accompanied him to take part in the final rigging of the project, as well as to photograph it. Francis Brunn, a German juggler, provided financial support for the proposed project and its planning.
Petit and his crew gained entry into the towers several times and hid in upper floors and on the roofs of the unfinished buildings to study security measures. They also analyzed the construction and identified places to anchor the wire and cavaletti. Using his own observations, drawings, and Moore's photographs, Petit constructed a scale model of the towers to design the needed rigging for the wire walk.
Working from the ID of an American who worked in the building, Petit made fake identification cards for himself and his collaborators (claiming they were contractors who were installing an electrified fence on the roof) to gain access to the buildings. Prior to this, Petit had carefully observed the clothes worn by construction workers and the kinds of tools they carried. He also took note of the clothing of office workers so that some of his collaborators could pose as white-collar workers. He observed what time the workers arrived and left, so he could determine when he would have roof access.
On the night of Tuesday, 6 August 1974, Petit and his crew had a lucky break and got a ride in a freight elevator to the 104th floor with their equipment. They stored it 19 steps below the roof. To pass the cable across the void, Petit and his crew had decided on using a bow and arrow attached to monofilament, attached to a rope. They had to practice this many times to perfect their technique. They first shot the fishing line, which was attached to larger ropes, and finally to the 450-pound (200 kg) steel cable. The team was delayed when the heavy cable sank too fast, and had to be pulled up manually for hours. Petit had already identified points at which to anchor two cavaletti (guy lines) to other points to stabilize the cable and keep the swaying of the wire to a minimum.
Shortly after 8 am local time on 7 August, Petit stepped out on the wire and started to perform. He was 1,350 feet (410 m) above the ground. He performed for 45 minutes, making eight passes along the wire, during which he walked, danced, lay down on the wire, and knelt to salute watchers. Crowds gathered on the streets below. He said later that he could hear their murmuring and cheers.
When New York Police Department and Port Authority Police Department police officers learned of his stunt, they came up to the roofs of both buildings to try to persuade him to leave the wire. They threatened to pluck him off by helicopter. Feeling that he had "trespassed long enough into these forbidden regions", and because the wire was starting to become dangerous to walk on due to rain, Petit left the wire and surrendered to the police.
There was extensive news coverage and public appreciation of Petit's highwire walk. District attorney Richard Kuh dropped all formal charges of trespassing and other items relating to his walk on condition that Petit give a free aerial show for children in Central Park. On Thursday, 29 August, he performed on a highwire walk in the park above Belvedere Lake (now Turtle Pond).
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey gave Petit a lifetime pass to the Twin Towers' observation deck. He autographed a steel beam close to the point where he began his walk, which was later destroyed in the September 11 attacks.