Long may both continue to pursue their passions and inspire us lesser mortals to unearth more of our own.”Īt Hellhole Bend, the schism has never been greater. “Petit is Astaire, where innovation and inspiration naturally came together to create works of art on a dance floor or ceiling. “Wallenda is Kelly, an athletic technician who danced beautifully, but he always looked a bit workmanlike,” wrote Churchill for the online Critics at Large. There was Wallenda's Christianity versus Petit's atheism, Wallenda's pragmatism and family-man commitments, Petit's aversion to commercialism and bachelor lifestyle.
In a discussion of craft and art, novelist David Churchill took note of more than stylistic divergences, from which there is no shortage of material.Įxpelled from five schools for misbehavior, arrested more than 500 times by his own count for unauthorized street juggling, Petit has a rebel image that stands in sharp contrast with Wallenda's reputation for working within the system.Ĭhurchill noted Wallenda's seven generational ties to the circus, versus Petit's learning to wirewalk at 16. But following Wallenda's Niagara Falls wirewalk in 2012, the distinctions between two of the world's premier aerialists were conspicuous to at least one critic who compared them to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. In an hourlong interview with the Herald-Tribune, Petit would not once utter Wallenda's name.
He would call it “Canyon Walk: A High-wire Opera.” His Trade Center tour-de-force was revisited in 2008 with an Academy Award-winning documentary, “Man On Wire.”Īnd yet, Petit vowed that his designs on running a cable across Hellhole Bend would eclipse that New York showstopper. Petit was arrested, but his penalty was to perform a juggling show for children, which he would parlay into a high-wire act in Central Park. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again. Recalled a Port Authority officer who attempted to coax Petit back to the safety of a rooftop: “When he got to the building we asked him to get off the high-wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle. “The anthill is in turmoil! Voices and sirens scream orders and counter-orders on the roofs and in the streets, but I hear mostly the streets, where the voice of the crowd overcomes that of emergency units.” “I rejoice at witnessing the disorder created by the announcement of my aerial escapade,” he wrote in “To Reach the Clouds,” his 2002 account of the moment. He lay on his back, dangled a leg off the wire, and even beckoned for a hovering seagull to approach. Nixon resigned as president, and with an assist from a tiny band of infiltrators, Petit illegally strung a steel cable between the Twin Towers of the brand new World Trade Center ahead of Manhattan's morning commuter rush.įor 45 minutes, in front of powerless rooftop police and uncounted thousands of awestruck spectators more than 1,300 feet below, Petit crossed the 200-foot void between the towers eight times. He would call it “the artistic crime of the century.” 7, 1974, a performance that will never be replicated. When the craft angled above the Little Colorado River, the view was so stunning that he called out an order to the pilot: “Stop! Stop! Stop!”Īs he would tell the world many times, he had just found the canvas for his “masterpiece.” That proclamation likely came as a surprise to those who remembered Petit's achievement of Aug. Petit says he understood Hellhole Bend's potential the moment he saw it from the window of a small plane a quarter-century ago.
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