It's Spiderman ... twice!

I came out of Dunkin' Donuts on my way to work this afternoon and everyone on the sidewalk was gawking at the Times building. I looked up and around the 50th floor, there was a guy. Climbing up one of the tallest skyscrapers in manhattan.

It was crazy. The police had half the block roped off. When I got to work the security guard told me the guy made it to the top and was immediately arrested.

The guy was Alain Robert, a French stuntman who's climbed other skyscrapers before. On the window outside the international weekly, where I was working today, he put up a green banner that said "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week."

A few hours later we were watching the footage on the news. After a few minutes we noticed that it said LIVE in the corner of the screen.

A second climber. Seriously. What the hell?!

So we all ran to the corner of the building where he was, but he was up to about the 30th floor by that time. Traffic in the entire neighborhood had completely stopped and people crowded the sidewalks for blocks and blocks. On the news you could see employees standing inside the windows gawking.

This second guy did not seem as sure of himself. He stopped by the windows to rest at every floor, and a few times it looked like he was going to slip. We all cheered as he finally made it to the top — 52 floors up — where the police were waiting on the roof to arrest him.

Had the climbers done some research they would have realized that the Times building his a history of things falling off of it. They got pretty damn lucky.

Alain Robert said he chose our building to make his statement because it's a green building. Which, incidentally, is why Renzo Piano decided to do the whole outside in WHITE FUCKING HORZONTAL BARS to make it more energy efficient.

I'm not surprised that someone climbed the building. I'm surprised that it took this long for anyone to try.