The Artwork that Spawned 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and Mystery

Twenty-five years ago, on the first day of spring, the members of Gelitin, an Austrian art collective, removed a window from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, extended a narrow balcony, and then emerged, 91 stories above the city. Hardly anyone noticed; the Times didn’t report on the incident until more than a year after, and a friend of the group denied it had taken place. The headline here hardly does justice to Kyle MacNeill’s feature, which is by turns a gripping procedural and a consideration of the fate of an artistic act—a messy, ambitious, controversial one—overwhelmed, a year later, by an atrocity committed at the same site.

The construction of the balcony itself only took half a day (Gelitin have built wooden sculptures and structures of far greater complexity over their career). The window took more work; it was like a car windshield, a frame with black rubber around it. They realized they needed to pull out the rubber like the tube off a bicycle, attach suction caps to hold the pane in place, and then hook it out with a small tool. They prepared for every outcome, including procuring a near-identical backup window from a manufacturer in case it smashed.

Gelitin utilized the WTC’s antiquated freight system to painstakingly cart up equipment and wooden beams; logistically this proved challenging as they had to be shunted in diagonally, and there were several different elevators to negotiate. Fortunately, security wasn’t much of an issue (although it had been tightened since the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center). “If you showed up with a pizza in the lobby for the 46th floor, you walked in,” Reither says. They would regularly sign in visitors and sometimes even stay overnight. Once, they even had to cut a beam down to size in the lobby with a jigsaw, and no one said a word. “It was classic New York. Everything was possible. Nobody used the word security.” 

They contacted a lawyer as a precaution and drafted a statement summarizing their exact plans. “What I remember is that he suggested we have 25-cent coins on us and a blow-up pillow. The 25 cents to make phone calls from the jail and the pillow for sleeping better, because U.S. jails do not provide pillows to the inmates. And he said, don’t do it. That was his advice,” Reither says. But they didn’t take too much notice. “Not falling out and not getting caught was the most important part of the operation. Our focus was fully on that.”