Where Wallenda plans to walk, another tightrope was stretched
The remnants of Phillippe Petit's rigging are still at Hellhole Bend, where the wirewalker planned a crossing but ran into financial obstacles. Now, the 63-year-old funambulist is fuming about Nik Wallenda's plan.
STAFF PHOTO
from: heraldtribune.com
by Billy Cox
Sunday, June 16, 2013
HELLHOLE BEND, Ariz. - As construction on the anchor foundations proceeds amid Hellhole Bend's pinyon and yucca scrub, it becomes immediately clear that Nik Wallenda isn't the first wirewalker to covet this view.
There are other steel cables on site as well, anchors driven into concrete beneath parched soil, and two stubby, weather-worn block-and-tackle mounts on opposite sides of the chasm. They have been sitting in place for 25 years.
The gear belonged to Philippe Petit, the celebrated French high-wire artist whose illegal 1974 wirewalk between the World Trade Center's twin towers established him as the most daring cable walker of his generation, perhaps of all time.
The remnants of Phillippe Petit's rigging are still at Hellhole Bend, where the wirewalker planned a crossing but ran into financial obstacles. Now, the 63-year-old funambulist is fuming about Nik Wallenda's plan.
STAFF PHOTO
from: heraldtribune.com
by Billy Cox
Sunday, June 16, 2013
HELLHOLE BEND, Ariz. - As construction on the anchor foundations proceeds amid Hellhole Bend's pinyon and yucca scrub, it becomes immediately clear that Nik Wallenda isn't the first wirewalker to covet this view.
There are other steel cables on site as well, anchors driven into concrete beneath parched soil, and two stubby, weather-worn block-and-tackle mounts on opposite sides of the chasm. They have been sitting in place for 25 years.
The gear belonged to Philippe Petit, the celebrated French high-wire artist whose illegal 1974 wirewalk between the World Trade Center's twin towers established him as the most daring cable walker of his generation, perhaps of all time.
STAFF PHOTO / THOMAS BENDER
Flagstaff contractor Frank Mayorga was among those who worked on Phillippe Petit's rigging. He was never paid.
But lately, the skyscraper-size butte Petit discovered in early 1988 — the same one that Wallenda will use for his globally televised wirewalking platform on June 23 — has become a ripped scab. At 63, the charismatic funambulist is accusing Sarasota's Wallenda of ruining his unrealized masterpiece.
“I am so outraged and I am extremely intellectually angry at the fact that somebody is now making my walk impossible,” Petit says from his home in the Catskill Mountains of New York state.
“Now, if that person was another artist with a creative soul and was making a magnificent crossing there, then maybe my anger would turn into some kind of respect. But I know the person who will walk there soon will just get — well, why not be cruel? — get his ass across, as they say sometimes in America, and nothing else.”
read more:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20130616/ARTICLE/130619729/2416/NEWS?Title=Where-Wallenda-plans-to-walk-another-tightrope-was-stretched
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