On a Highwire Across the Great Falls of the Passaic River

Philippe Petit and the Poetry of Silk City

Aug 15, 2024

In the dog days of early August 1974, the French aerialist, Philippe Petit, extended a 131-foot galvanized steel cable between the Twin Towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center using a spear to do so. Once secured, he stepped out into the gray morning, laughing at first “because it was so beautiful,” then walked, jumped, and lay down on the high wire, all for almost an hour before returning to the building, where he was promptly arrested.

Philippe Petit’s performance between the Twin Towers was as monumental as Nixon’s resignation just a day later. This month, the extraordinary and exhilarating skywalk that made his name instantly recognizable celebrated its golden anniversary.

Not so well known, but also at the fifty-year mark, is what Petit did next.

Once released from jail, and after a mandatory performance in Central Park (a condition of the Manhattan DA dropping charges of disorderly conduct and criminal trespass), Philippe Petit traveled west where he enjoyed some much-needed R&R at the Marriott Motor Hotel in Saddle Brook, NJ. What followed was his appearance on Labor Day, performing his acrobatics high above the Great Falls of the Passaic River. High above another mesmerized crowd.

It might seem surprising that his next big stop was Paterson, once described by the architectural critic Paul Goldberger—though not without affection—as “a place that people think less of going to than of leaving.”

And yet the grittiness of the city has always been an artistic inspiration. In 1972, George A. Tice was the first living photographer to have a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The entire exhibit consisted of photographs from his book, Paterson. He’d decided on his subject while photographing the rock formations on Garret Mountain. Tice looked down on the old mills and the fading downtown and found everything right there: an evolving cityscape, with the mountain its constant. For Tice, the Great Falls was essential to his work; a part of the natural world and the force moving early industry.

Photo Credit: Digital Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY) Paterson, New Jersey: 30 Photographs by George A. Tice

The 77-foot drop of raging water is what Junot Díaz has called “a national treasure of alarming power.”

While it’s true the Falls holds enormous sway as muse, cropping up in places like filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s fictionalized version of a Paterson poet, the city’s lyricism comes from its streets and two-family homes and corner bodegas. A tour of Paterson’s poets would surely begin with William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, but it would eventually find its way to the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, where Billy Collins, Amiri Baraka, and Lucille Clifton have held readings and where “working class people and recent American emigrants [are offered] a new way of looking at American life through literature art and culture.”1 The Poetry Center’s working-class roots come from its founder, Maria Mazziotti Gillian, Professor Emeritus at SUNY-Binghamton, who’s known for narrative verse that draws from her childhood in Paterson’s Riverside section, what was then an Italian enclave.

Rosa Alcalá, the DeWetter Endowed Chair in Poetry at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program, also grew up in Paterson’s Riverside section and her work returns frequently to the city’s textile industry, a tribute to both her parents.

Poets, evoking both the past and present of one of America’s most historic industrial cities, but also storytellers and gentle caretakers of the Paterson they’d grown up in.

The rough feel of a washcloth
and Lifebuoy soap against my face,
the stiff, starched feel of my blouse,
the streets of Paterson, old and cracked,
the houses leaning together
like crooked teeth…
~ Maria Mazziotti Gillian, excerpt from “In the Still Photograph, Paterson, New Jersey, Circa 1950”

More than the written word, it’s Larry Doby’s swing of his bat; it’s Victor Cruz dancing salsa in the end zone; it’s Lou Costello’s comic timing (and the stance of every Golden Glove boxer who ever trained at his gym); it’s Philippe Petit stopping by for a visit and pirouetting in the mist of the Great Falls. “The poem as a way of life.”

[T]he rich brick facades of the mills and the crisp forms of the smokestacks play off against one another, with the cliffs of the Great Falls providing a serene background. It is a place in which it is almost easy to romanticize these buildings and to forget that they were, for all their architectural splendor, far from wonderful places in which to work. But they remain a positive and, on the whole, proud part of our history. And in any case they create a civilizing urban environment - a cityscape the likes of which we will not make again in our time.2

Episode Notes

My forthcoming novel, Nightswimming is a police procedural set in Paterson in the late 1970s and gearing up for the release date—2025—I’ve been meaning to write about the city here on Substack. Also, it’s my hometown, so thanks for letting me share this with you.