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Updated, 6:30 p.m. | Alain Robert, a French stuntman known for climbing tall buildings, scaled the north face of the New York Times building on Thursday, ascending 52 stories to the roof and clutching a bright green banner, before police officers arrested him around 12:22 p.m. (Update: Hours later, a second man was arrested after climbing to the roof on another part of the building. For a complete account of the day’s events, see the article prepared for Friday print editions.)
Police and security officials cordoned off the sidewalk below, on West 41st Street, as a crowd assembled. The words on the banner were illegible from the sidewalk, but from office windows inside the tower the slogan on the banner could be clearly read: “Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week.”
The man later confirmed, moments after being arrested on the roof of the tower, that he was Alain Robert, a 46-year-old stuntman famous for scaling structures like the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, the Sydney Opera House in Australia and the Eiffel Tower and Montparnasse Tower in Paris.
He wore a T-shirt with his name and the address of a Web site (thesolutionissimple.org), exercise pants and climbing shoes. He had long blond hair. He used no rope, harness or parachute.
Police officers blocked off the sidewalk at the base of the building and asked members of the crowd to move along. Construction workers on a building directly across West 41st Street, facing the northern face of the building, looked on with expressions of astonishment and amusement. A crowd gathered on the sidewalk, pointing, gawking and capturing pictures and images with cellphones, digital cameras and video cameras.
“This is a publicity stunt, it looks like,” Janet L. Robinson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, said as she entered the building. “There is definitely going to be an arrest.”
Wearing a backpack slung over one shoulder, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the chairman of The Times Company and publisher of The Times, who is himself an avid climber, ducked under the police tape and examined the spectacle. He declined to comment.
Alain Robert, a stuntman, climbed the 52-story New York Times building on Thursday before he was arrested. His banner read, “Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week.” (Photo: Sewell Chan/The New York Times)
Inside the building, reporters and editors pressed their faces to the glass windows to catch a glimpse of the climber. He weaved in and out of the ceramic rod facade, seeming to rest on the building’s exterior beams every few floors before swinging himself back out the face of the rods to resume his climb. He stopped occasionally to wave to the crowd, which included construction workers on a building across the street and others in front of the Port Authority.
Each time he took his hand away to wave, there were gasps from observers who feared he might fall.
As Mr. Robert climbed the building, police officers from the Emergency Services Unit, using a freight elevator, assembled on the roof. “He’s up to 30-something,” one police officer radioed another. “No, he’s up to 45,” another officer radioed back.
A security guard remarked, “Apparently, he’s a professional climber,” and a police officer replied: “To be honest, looking at this building, you don’t have to be a professional. This building is like a ladder.” (Designed to be environmentally sensitive, the tower is sheathed in distinctive horizontal ceramic rods that are intended to diffuse sunlight, allowing natural light to enter the building while keeping out heat and increasing the building’s energy efficiency.)
Around a dozen police officers were on the roof when Mr. Robert arrived there. One of them put on a hard hat, harnessed himself to the building and sat out on a beam, a couple of feet from the building, as Mr. Robert reached the top. When he got to the top, he calmly perched himself on the same beam, beside the officer, and raised his hands. The pair began talking.
Mr. Robert was placed in handcuffs and led across the roof and into a service elevator. The police officers had evidently made preparations in case he resisted, but he submitted peacefully. A Times reporter asked, “Where are you from and why are you doing this?” Mr. Robert said, “France. Paris.”
Mr. Robert was taken down through the service elevator to an underground service area of the building. A reporter asked why he had chosen The Times’s building. His reply: “This is a green building, which is a fantastic step.” He proceeded to talk about global warming as the police led him away. He said he believed the news media would give more prominence to coverage of global warming if a man climbed a prominent building.
A view of Alain Robert from inside the Times building, as he climbed it. (Photo: Matthew Orr/The New York Times)
Asked about the difficulty of the climb, he replied: “No, the building was easy. It was just a statement. Plus, I’m a professional climber.”
He added: “My name is Alain Robert. I did climb about 80 buildings around the world and I climbed even the five tallest.”
Then he was moved into a squad car and driven away, east on West 40th Street. He was taken to the Midtown South police precinct.
New York’s skyscrapers have long been sites for death-defying stunts. In 1974, a French stunt artist, Philippe Petit, famously walked a high-wire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. (Mr. Petit’s feat is the subject of a new documentary, “Man on a Wire,” which has received critical acclaim.)
More recently, in 2006, another stuntman, Jeb Corliss, was arrested after trying to jump off the observation deck of the Empire State Building. (Mr. Corliss challenged his indictment in court. A trial judge ruled last year that as a professional jumper, he was experienced and careful enough to jump off a building without endangering his own life or anyone else’s. But this year, an appellate court overturned the ruling, although it reduced the charge in the indictment from a felony charge of reckless endangerment with depraved indifference to life, to a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment.)
Mr. Robert is a practitioner of free-soloing, a kind of climbing done without ropes, harnesses or other external supports. (”Free climbing,” another kind of climbing, involves no equipment to aid in the climb, but does include ropes for protection in the event of a fall.)
Alain Robert stands on a ledge outside the building. (Photo: Matthew Orr/The New York Times)“Climbing is my passion, my philosophy of life,” Mr. Robert states on his Web site, adding, “Although I suffer from vertigo, although my accidents left me disabled up to 60 percent, I have become the best solo climber.” The Web site states that in eight years, Mr. Robert has climbed more than “70 skyscrapers and mythical monuments around the world.”
The 52-story steel-and-glass Times building, at 620 Eighth Avenue, between West 40th and 41st Streets, was designed by Renzo Piano and opened last year. A personal assistant at Mr. Piano’s architectural studio in Paris said he was traveling and not immediately available for comment.
Along with The Times, it is occupied by several law firms, including Covington & Burling, Seyfarth Shaw and Goodwin Procter. Before The Times moved last year, it had previously occupied a neo-Renaissance building at 229 West 43rd Street since 1913.
Inspector James McCarthy, the commanding officer of the Midtown South police precinct, said Mr. Robert would likely face several criminal charges, including, at the least, reckless endangerment.
Reporting was contributed by Corey Kilgannon, Eric Konigsberg, Jennifer 8. Lee, Conrad Mulcahy and Allen Salkin.
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