Culture

Crazy Person Nik Wallenda Wants to Tightrope-Walk the NYC Skyline Next

The high-wire daredevil had barely finished kissing the ground after his tense, windswept, death-defying walk across the Grand Canyon when he announced his next goal: to walk across the 9-city-block canyon between Manhattan's Empire State and Chrysler buildings.

By Connor Simpson
Saved Stories
This article is from the archive of our partner .

High-wire daredevil Nik Wallenda had barely finished kissing the ground after his tense, windswept, death-defying walk across the Grand Canyon when he announced his next goal: to walk across the 9-city-block canyon between Manhattan's Empire State and Chrysler buildings. The New York Post reports the man on the two-inch wire's next breathtaking act would amount to some 4,000 feet across — approximately three times as long as Wallenda's "Skywire" stunt across the Little Colorado River last night. Using some back-of-the-napkin math, that means Wallenda would spend roughly a full hour walking from one skyscraper to another — despite his shaky, more-nervous-than-expected outing on the Discovery channel last night. "Joe Cool ain't so cool right now," Wallenda said about halfway through his blustery, 1,500-foot-high attempt.

The seventh-generation Wallenda took a little over 20 minutes to complete those 1,400 feet across the river, battling that howling wind that shook the wire and sent the millions watching at home into fits. Wallenda kept thanking God and Jesus on his live mic, at some points even pleading for God to help "calm the cable down." And, hey, maybe Wallenda knows something we don't: The wire calmed down, and he just kept inching along slowly but surely towards the other side, the solid ground, and a ratings win. Just in time for Mad Men, too. Imagine this view, except with New York traffic whizzing around beneath him:

But there's one very important thing Wallenda will need before he can walk across the Gotham skyline and into the history books with Philippe Petit, who walked across the Twin Towers in 1974, as documented in the terrific 2008 documentary Man on Wire: city approval. Does anyone know if Bloomberg was watching last night?

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.