56. The Silly Season and Joyce Green Hospital

Key words & phrases: The silly season, Philippe Petit, the Twin Towers (World Trade Centre, N.Y.), Notre Dame Cathedral of Paris, Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (N.Y)

No. 56

August forms part of the silly season, that mid to late summer period when Parliament and the Law Courts are not sitting and when serious news seems hard to come by. Newspaper sales usually slump at this time because of the reduction in political & business material and because readers often allow the delivery of their regular newspaper to lapse whilst they are away on holiday. Thus in order to retain customers, editors often have to resort to printing attention-grabbing headlines and articles to boost their sales even if the quality of the news is of questionable quality.

So American and international newspaper publishers must have been delighted when the 24-year-old French high-wire artist Philippe Petit decided to walk a tightrope suspended between the still unfinished Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York on 7 August 1974.

After six years of learning everything possible about the buildings Petit spent about 45 minutes walking, running, dancing, hopping and even lying down on the wire, which was less than an inch in diameter, with some 100,000 people watching. He made his illegal journey between the towers, a quarter mile above the ground, eight times even stopping to kneel and to salute on occasion. Then he descended into the arms of the police.

Prior to his Twin Towers stunt Petit did a similar walk across a wire strung between two spires of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and again between two pylons on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In 1986, in a gesture to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he also walked a wire from a church in west Jerusalem across a valley to the wall of Jerusalem's Old City.

Petit still lives in New York City where he is apparently artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Why ? Because according to Petit he is first and foremost an artist and not an adrenaline junkie.

So here’s a gap-filler of a question for the silly season ? Although you may not recall anyone hang-gliding off the top of the highest building on the site, do you remember anyone taking part in any dare-devil feats at Joyce Green Hospital whilst you were there ?