WTC Climber George Willig Would Do It All Again

The World
Trade Center will now forever be synonymous with tragedy, but there was a time,
24 years ago, when the towers were better known as the stage for a brilliant
act of daring. May 26, 1977, was a perfect spring morning. At 6:30 a.m., a 27-year-old
rock climber from Bellerose, Queens, clipped his gear–two stirrups and
a harness on nylon straps–into a custom-made clamp he had set into a window-washing
channel in the corner of Tower 2 and started to climb–straight up, no net.

George Willig
was a man on a mission. A year earlier, he caught a glimpse of the then-new
World Trade Center. It was "shimmering with golden light with the sun low
in the sky," he tells me in a phone conversation from his California home,
and an irresistible idea was born: he would be the first man ever to climb a
skyscraper. The idea was not as crazy at it sounds.

Willig was
an experienced free climber, one of those daring souls who pit themselves against
walls of rock at places like Yosemite and the Grand Tetons, armed with little
more than rope, clamps and ice-cold blood. To him, the WTC’s 110 stories
of vertical steel was a manmade rock face begging to be conquered. There was
just one big technical problem to overcome, however: how to get a foothold in
the slick steel facade.

He visited
the buildings over the next year, examining them for some clue of how to work
it out. Willig’s homework included some nighttime visits that, in those
pre-terrorist days, aroused only minimal police suspicion. On one of those trips,
he discovered that each tower was equipped from top to bottom with a channel
to guide window-washing equipment. As a skilled machinist and modelmaker, Willig
figured he could create a clamp to insert into that channel. The device that
rock climbers call an "ascender" would slide up when his weight was
off it but hold firmly when he leaned back against it. It took him a couple
of tries to perfect the clamps–which he secretly tested on the building–but
finally got them right. After a year of planning and work he was ready to go.

He would
be climbing the tower at precisely the moment New York City needed an emotional
lift. Thinking back to 1977, Willig remembers, "It was depressing in a
way. Abe Beame was mayor and the city was in dire financial straits." And
the federal government was in no mood to help us out. "A lot of people
around the country thought New York was getting what it deserved." While
Willig insists that his plan was "not intended in any way to make New Yorkers
feel better about themselves," the timing, he says, "could not have
been better."

Accompanied
by his brother Steve, friend Jery Hewitt and photographer Mike Cardacino, Willig
hooked himself up to the first clamp, which he’d installed in the channel
the night before, and began to climb. One thousand, three hundred fifty feet
of steel stood between him and the observation deck. He strolled it vertically,
18 inches at a time.

Willig climbed
leisurely, all the better to savor the experience. "When I started, I felt
good. I was frightened–but I was more afraid of failure than death."
From the ground, he made his way in solitude and peace to the 66th floor, enjoying
the glorious May weather and the unique view. By the time he got to 66, though,
Willig was no longer a lone man, happily scaling a skyscraper on a nice day.
Word was out. From below, thousands of New Yorkers gawked at him from the plaza.
From above, the police–who did not share Willig’s confidence in his
climbing skills–lowered a construction scaffold to meet him.

Policeman
DeWitt Allen, coming down, was the first one to reach Willig, going up. "‘We’ve
got to stop meeting like this,’" Willig recalls Allen saying, "‘my
wife is getting annoyed.’" Even though it was obvious that Willig
knew what he was doing, the cops still wanted him to get on the scaffold to
be hoisted to the top. Willig wanted none of that. He joked that he "didn’t
want to make a dangerous move" like riding the scaffolding.

The cops
let him finish the three-and-a-half-hour climb. They didn’t arrest him
until after he crawled, triumphantly, through a hatch on the 110th floor and
signed some autographs for them.

The response
to Willig’s trippily giddy trespass was immediate and ecstatic. The Daily
News called him the "Human Fly"; the New York Post opted
for "super ‘fly.’" City officials at first planned to sock
Willig with a $250,000 fine, but Mayor Beame quickly sensed that most New Yorkers
loved the stunt and instead settled "out of court" for $1.10–a
penny per floor–which Willig paid at a City Hall photo op the next day.

The media
blitz was on. Willig buzzed from tv show to tv show, talking to Johnny Carson
(and his pinch-hitter, David Letterman), Mike Douglas, Stanley Siegel and Merv
Griffin. A week after the climb, the WTC’s public relations company staged
a ceremony on the observation deck and brought Willig back to sign his name
to the tower.

Eventually
the self-described "introspective loner" discovered that celebrity
was more burden than pleasure, and not long after his week of fame, Willig moved
to California and out of mic’s way. He now leads a quiet life with his
wife in a Los Angeles suburb, working as a project manager for the construction
company Winn Caribe. He frequently visits family in New York and has always
made it a point to visit the towers. He was last there in June 2000 to film
a tv show on tall buildings for the Learning Channel.

The man
who made New Yorkers feel good about the hard-to-love towers was on vacation
in China when he heard the news about the Sept. 11 attack. Willig’s proprietary
feelings about the Twin Towers had never waned over the years, and watching
CNN in his hotel in Xian, his first, emotional response to what he saw was a
guilty sense that his escapade might have somehow helped turn the towers into
a target.

When I asked
about his signature on the South Tower, which was still visible from the Observation
Deck right up until the day of the attack, his voice chokes–but he sounds
genuinely optimistic when he says, "I hope they find it." And although
he had "no personal ongoing relationship with anyone" who was killed
in the attack, he frets about "the guys who work the automatic window-washers,"
the people who literally follow in his footsteps.

To raise
money for relief efforts, Willig thinks it would be great to tour the country
with a multimedia production to show people what the Trade Center was really
like. He’d also like to be part of any reconstruction commission and is
even thinking of coming back to New York to work on some of the actual rebuilding.
He favors rebuilding the towers just as they were. If they did, would he climb
the tower again? "I would love to climb the new World Trade Center,"
he says, "as part of the opening celebrations."