We were just discussing with our roommate that New York is a great place to live for the slightly strange, because you can have whatever life you want here. There are so many worlds in New York and all one has to do is find the right fit. For some that world exists in the city's sky scrapers. But the world was especially cruel to two nut jobs who were arrested after climbing the New York Times building yesterday. Yeah, Spidey-style.
Two men, one a practiced French stuntman known for climbing tall buildings, the other a New Yorker who said he wanted to raise awareness of the dangers of malaria, scaled the 52-story New York Times Building in Times Square on Thursday just hours apart. Each was arrested when he stepped safely onto the roof.
Alain Robert, a Frenchman known for climbing tall buildings, was met by officers at the roof. He had unfurled a banner protesting global warming.
Later in the day, a man identified by the police as Renaldo Clarke scaled the tower’s western side, where people on the 50th floor watched his ascent.
The first, Alain Robert, the Frenchman, went up the north face of the year-old skyscraper in the morning, unfurling a bright green banner near the top. The words on the banner were illegible from the sidewalk, but from office windows inside the tower the message could be clearly read: “Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week.”
...Both climbers grabbed onto one of the building’s most distinctive features, the ladderlike horizontal rods that form an exterior curtain surrounding the floor-to-ceiling windows. And then, in turn, they were off on a hand-over-hand trip up the face of a New York skyscraper, with no ropes or harnesses, a trip that left the cellphone-camera-snapping crowds that swirled below thinking of Spider-Man, or maybe King Kong.
Don't you think the whole malaria awareness thing would have been more effective had the guy been dressed as a giant mosquito?
[New York Times: 2 Men Scale New York Times Building Hours Apart]