Ladder-Day Saint

On the morning of August 7, 1974, the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit performed one of the great stunts in this city’s history, crossing back and forth on a steel cable strung between the World Trade Center’s North and South Towers, some 1,312 feet above street level. “On one side, the mass of a mountain,” Petit wrote in To Reach the Clouds, his 2002 account of the day. “On the other, the universe of the clouds, so full of unknown that it seems empty to us.”

Those words rang through the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine’s darkened interior earlier this month, at a performance consecrating the fiftieth anniversary of Petit’s dalliance with the void. “I approach the edge,” Petit’s recorded voice said over the speakers, and at that moment he approached the edge of a landing that had been erected twenty feet above the nave floor. “I step over the beam,” he said, pretending to step over the South Tower’s parapet wall. Then the part we had all been waiting for: “I place my left foot on the steel rope.” The Man on Wire was on wire again. Several people in my section…