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Philippe Petit walks on a tightrope between the Twin Towers

High above the early-morning traffic in Lower Manhattan, a French street performer steps off the roof of the south tower of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. Clad in black and carrying a long pole for balance, Philippe Petit begins the most famous high-wire walk in history, calmly traversing the space between the Twin Towers at a height of 1,350 feet.

Petit enjoyed tightrope walking from a young age, and began his career as a juggler on the streets of Paris. Amazingly, he first imagined himself walking between the Twin Towers before they had even been built. As he later recounted, the idea came to him because of a dental emergency: “Here I am, young, 17-years-old, with a bad tooth in one of those un-colorful waiting room of a French dentist … suddenly, I freeze because I have opened a newspaper at a page and I see something magnificent, something that inspires me. I see two towers and the article says one day those towers will be built.”

The towers would be not open until 1973, but Petit was determined he would one day walk between them. He began his high-wire career with walks between the towers of Notre Dame in 1971 and the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1973. Although he trained with a circus performer and thought of himself as a “poet, conquering beautiful stages,” his preparations to walk between the Twin Towers most closely resembled scenes from a heist film. He disguised himself as everything from a construction worker to a journalist to an architect in order to gain access and study the site, even casing it from above via helicopter and identifying Barry Greenhouse, a man who worked on the 82^nd floor of the south tower, as his inside man.

On the night of August 6, 1974, with Greenhouse’s help, Petit and some accomplices made their way into the towers, split into two teams. One of them shot an arrow across the gap between the buildings, spanning it with a length of fishing line that was then used to string stronger support wires. Around 7 a.m. the next morning, Petit stepped out onto the wire. Over the next 50 minutes, he completed eight trips across the divide, bowing to the onlookers below and even stopping to sit and lie down on the inch-thick wire. Finally, he dismounted and surrendered to the police, who arrested him and took him in for psychological evaluation.

Petit was charged with criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped on the condition that he perform for the public in Central Park, which he happily did. Petit went on to perform a similar walk at the Lincoln Center and become the artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on the Upper West Side. He insisted that his famous walk, which was documented in the film Man on Wire and dramatized in another film, The Walk, was not an artistic statement so much as a natural outgrowth of his attitude toward life: “I see three oranges, and I have to juggle. I see two towers, and I have to walk.”

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New York City’s Chinatown shuts down to protest police brutality

New York City’s Chinatown is almost entirely shut down on May 19, 1975, with shuttered stores displaying signs reading “Closed to Protest Police Brutality.” The demonstration is a reaction to the New York Police Department’s treatment of Peter Yew, a Chinese-American architectural engineer who was arrested, viciously beaten and charged with felonious assault after he witnessed the police beating a Chinese teenager and attempted to intervene.

In late April of 1975, Yew witnessed the NYPD stop a 15-year-old for an alleged traffic violation and tried to intervene when they began assaulting him. In doing so, he angered the officers, who Yew alleged beat him and arrested him, took him to the local precinct, stripped him, and beat him more while charging him with a felony. The shocking incident was the final straw for Chinatown residents who had long endured racist and dehumanizing treatment at the hands of the NYPD, and it led to weeks of unrest in the area. In the aftermath of the beatings, locals demonstrated outside the precinct, receiving further violent backlash from the police, and 2,500 people marched on nearby City Hall in a protest that, according to the New York Times, “had young students protesting side‐by‐side with their parents and grandparents, chanting together in Chinese.”

On May 19, local businesses joined the protest and activists again marched in the streets, coming to blows with police as they demanded better social services for their community. The charges against Yew were eventually dropped, the captain of the local precinct was reassigned—though not fired—and the unrest galvanized support for organizations like the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and Asian Americans for Equal Employment, both of which organized in protest of Yew’s beating.

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World Trade Center, then the world’s tallest building, opens in New York City

Year: 1973

Month Day: April 04

The “Twin Towers” of the World Trade Center officially open in New York City. The buildings replaced the Empire State Building as the world’s tallest building. Though they would only hold that title for a year, they remained a dominant feature of the city’s skyline and were recognizable the world over long before they were destroyed in a terrorist attack in 2001.

Planning, designing and clearing space for the World Trade Center took over a decade. The New York State Legislature originally approved the idea in 1943, but concrete plans did not materialize until the 1960s. The deal that created the new complex, of which the Twin Towers would be the centerpiece, also included the creation of the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation, or PATH, to operate the trains which entered Manhattan from New Jersey on what was to become the grounds of the WTC. Architect Minoru Yamasaki drew inspiration from Arabic architecture for the towers’ design. In order to efficiently move people up and down the 110-story towers, Yamasaki and his team developed the concept of express elevators—based on the New York City Subway’s system of express and local trains—that traveled directly to “sky lobbies” on the 44 and 78 floor, from which “local” elevators ran to neighboring floors. The first tenants moved into the North Tower in December of 1970, with the official opening of both buildings taking place over two years later.

The towers’ construction ended the Empire State Building’s 41-year run as the tallest building in the world. They were replaced by Chicago’s Sears Tower the following year, an indication of the rising trend of supertall construction. The World Trade Center dramatically altered the New York skyline and the cityscape of Lower Manhattan. As such, they were often used as a shorthand for the area in visual media, and were frequently included in establishing shots of films set in New York. Though most of the World Trade Center was occupied by office space, the Top of the World Observation Deck on the South Tower became a popular tourist destination, as did the North Tower’s Windows on the World restaurant, which featured its own wine school.

The towers were first targeted by terrorists in 1993, when a bomb exploded in the garage under the North Tower, killing six and injuring over 1,000. The Twin Towers were destroyed, and were the site of the vast majorities of the casualties, on September 11, 2001, a final chapter that has since overshadowed the rest of the World Trade Center’s story. The building that replaced them, One World Trade Center, was completed in 2014 and is currently the seventh-tallest building in the world.

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Labor organizer and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez begins hunger strike

Year: 1972

Month Day: May 01

On May 1, 1972, Mexican-American labor organizer and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez begins a hunger strike. The strike, which he undertook in opposition to an Arizona law severely restricting farm workers’ ability to organize, lasted 24 days and drew national attention to the suffering of itinerant farm workers in the Southwest.

A fervent admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, Chavez had undertaken several hunger strikes before. As a co-founder of the United Farm Workers, he and his strikes had played important roles in many major labor actions, including the five-year Delano Grape Strike in California. In response to the wave of organizing that had swept the region, Arizona’s legislature passed a bill that constricted workers’ rights to organize, outlawed secondary boycotts, and allowed growers to obtain a restraining order to prevent strikes during the harvest. Despite an outcry from farm workers and Chavez’s request that they meet to discuss the bill, Governor Jack Williams immediately signed it into law. Later that day, Chavez began his fast.

An increasingly emaciated Chavez appeared regularly at mass, attended by his supporters and others from the civil rights movement. Coretta Scott King, whose husband Martin Luther King, Jr. had supported Chavez in his previous strikes, attended one such mass, as did Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. Chavez referred to the strike as “a fast of sacrifice,” repeatedly reminding observers that his suffering was meant to represent the daily suffering of farm workers. Finally, after 24 days, he ended his fast at a memorial mass for Bobby Kennedy, who had thrown his political support behind Chavez’s cause in the years prior to his 1968 assassination. The following year, Chavez and the UFW organized another major agricultural strike, the Lettuce Growers Strike, and in1975 California passed a landmark law affirming workers’ rights to boycott and to collective bargaining.

READ MORE: Cesar Chavez: His Life and Legacy

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Deng Xiaoping and Jimmy Carter sign accords

Year: 1979

Month Day: January 29

On January 29, 1979, Deng Xiaoping, deputy premier of China, meets President Jimmy Carter, and together they sign historic new accords that reverse decades of U.S. opposition to the People’s Republic of China.

Deng Xiaoping lived out a full and complete transformation of China. The son of a landowner, he joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1920 and participated in Mao Zedong’s Long March in 1934. In 1945, he was appointed to the Party Central Committee and, with the 1949 victory of the communists in the Chinese Civil War, became the regional party leader of southwestern China. Called to Beijing as deputy premier in 1952, he rose rapidly, became general secretary of the CCP in 1954, and a member of the ruling Political Bureau in 1955.

A major policy maker, he advocated individualism and material incentives in China’s attempt to modernize its economy, which often brought him into conflict with Mao and his orthodox communist beliefs. With the launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Deng was attacked as a capitalist and removed from high party and government posts. He disappeared from public view and worked in a tractor factory, but in 1973 was reinstated by Premier Zhou Enlai, who again made him deputy premier. When Zhou fell ill in 1975, Deng became the effective leader of China.

In January 1976, Zhou died, and in the subsequent power struggle Deng was purged by the “Gang of Four”–strict Maoists who had come to power in the Cultural Revolution. In September, however, Mao Zedong died, and Deng was rehabilitated after the Gang of Four fell from power. He resumed his post as deputy premier, often overshadowing Premier Hua Guofeng.

Deng sought to open China to foreign investment and create closer ties with the West. In January 1979, he signed accords with President Jimmy Carter, and later that year the United States granted full diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China.

In 1981, Deng strengthened his position by replacing Hua Guofeng with his protege, Hu Yaobang, and together the men instituted widespread economic reforms in China. The reforms were based on capitalist models, such as the decentralization of various industries, material incentives as the reward for economic success, and the creation of a skilled and well-educated financial elite. As chief adviser to a series of successors, he continued to be the main policy maker in China during the 1980s.

Under Deng, China’s economy rapidly grew, and citizens enjoyed expanded personal, economic, and cultural freedoms. Political freedoms were still greatly restricted, however, and China continued as an authoritative one-party state. In 1989, Deng hesitantly supported the government crackdown on the democratic demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Later that year, he resigned his last party post but continued to be an influential adviser to the Chinese government until his death in 1997.

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The Stonewall Riots begin in NYC’s Greenwich Village

Sometime after midnight on June 28, 1969, in what is now regarded by many as history’s first major protest on behalf of equal rights for LGBTQ people, a police raid of the Stonewall Inn—a popular gay club located on New York City‘s Christopher Street—turns violent as patrons and local sympathizers begin rioting against the authorities.

Although the police were legally justified in raiding the club, which was serving liquor without a license among other violations, New York’s gay community had grown weary of the police department targeting gay clubs, many of which had already been closed.

Soon, the crowd began throwing bottles at the police. The protest spilled over into the neighboring streets, and order was not restored until the deployment of New York’s riot police sometime after 4 a.m.

The Stonewall Riots were followed by several days of demonstrations in New York and was the impetus for the formation of the Gay Liberation Front as well as other gay, lesbian and bisexual civil rights organizations. The next year, in 1970, New York’s first official gay pride parade set off from Stonewall and marched up 6th Avenue. June was later designated LGBTQ Pride Month to commemorate the uprising.

In 2019, the New York Police Department formally apologized for its role in the Stonewall Riots, and for the discriminatory laws that targeted gay people.

Explore the history of the LGBTQ movement in America here.

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Boeing 707 crashes into a mountain near Agadir, Morocco

Year: 1975

Month Day: August 03

On August 3, 1975, a chartered Boeing 707 jetliner crashes in the Atlas Mountains near Agadir, a coastal city in Morocco. All 188 people aboard the plane were killed, in the fourth worst air disaster to that date.

Owned by the Jordanian airline Alia and chartered to Royal Air Maroc, the 707 left LeBourget Airport in Paris at 2:20 a.m. on the morning of August 3, 1975. Apart from four Europeans, all of the passengers on board were Moroccan citizens who worked in France and were traveling home for their summer holidays. The flight disappeared from Agadir airport-control radar at 4:28 a.m.; an airport official had spoken via radio with the pilot moments earlier, with no hint of trouble. The plane was scheduled to land in Agadir just two minutes later, at 4:30 a.m., and was descending for approach in heavy fog when the right wing tip and one of the engines struck a peak at an altitude of 2,400 feet. The pilot lost control of the plane, which crashed into a ravine, exploded and burned near the small, remote village of Imzizen. All 181 passengers were killed, along with seven crew members.

The incident outside Agadir marked the fourth worst air disaster in history, after a Turkish DC10 that crashed March 3, 1974 north of Paris, killing all 345 passengers and crew; a U.S. military plane that went down outside Saigon on April 4, 1974, killing more than 200; and a chartered Dutch DC8 jetliner that crashed in Sri Lanka on December 4, 1971, killing 191.

The Boeing 707 first went into service in 1958, having been developed to meet the need of airlines (particularly Pan-American) for a trans-Atlantic jetliner with a large seating capacity. With its four engines, the 707 was capable of traveling some 6,000 miles (enough to cross the Atlantic Ocean) nonstop, and boasted a seating capacity of up to 190 people. Thanks to the popularity of the 707 among international airlines, Boeing became world’s biggest aircraft manufacturer, pushing aside rival Douglas Aircraft Company (later the McDonnell Douglas Corporation).

The Morocco crash of August 1975 was the second crash of a Boeing 707 to occur over the course of the 1970s; a Jordanian 707 had crashed at Nigeria’s Kano Airport in January 1973, killing 176 people. In 1978, Boeing ended production of the 707. U.S. airlines sold most of their remaining 707s to Third World carriers, some of them priced as low as $1 million.

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Shah flees Iran

Year: 1979

Month Day: January 16

Faced with an army mutiny and violent demonstrations against his rule, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the leader of Iran since 1941, is forced to flee the country. Fourteen days later, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the Islamic revolution, returned after 15 years of exile and took control of Iran.

In 1941, British and Soviet troops occupied Iran, and the first Pahlavi shah, who they regarded with suspicion, was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza. The new shah promised to act as a constitutional monarch but often meddled in the elected government’s affairs. After a Communist plot against him was thwarted in 1949, he took on even more powers. However, in the early 1950s, the shah was eclipsed by Mohammad Mosaddeq, a zealous Iranian nationalist who convinced the Parliament to nationalize Britain’s extensive oil interests in Iran. Mohammad Reza, who maintained close relations with Britain and the United States, opposed the decision. Nevertheless, he was forced in 1951 to appoint Mosaddeq premier, and two years of tension followed.

In August 1953, Mohammad Reza attempted to dismiss Mosaddeq, but the premier’s popular support was so great that the shah himself was forced out of Iran. A few days later, British and U.S. intelligence agents orchestrated a stunning coup d’etat against Mosaddeq, and the shah returned to take power as the sole leader of Iran. He repealed Mosaddeq’s legislation and became a close Cold War ally of the United States in the Middle East.

In 1963, the shah launched his “White Revolution,” a broad government program that included land reform, infrastructure development, voting rights for women, and the reduction of illiteracy. Although these programs were applauded by many in Iran, Islamic leaders were critical of what they saw as the westernization of Iran. Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shiite cleric, was particularly vocal in his criticism and called for the overthrow of the shah and the establishment of an Islamic state. In 1964, Khomeini was exiled and settled across the border in Iraq, where he sent radio messages to incite his supporters.

The shah saw himself foremost as a Persian king and in 1971 held an extravagant celebration of the 2,500th anniversary of the pre-Islamic Persian monarchy. In 1976, he formally replaced the Islamic calendar with a Persian calendar. Religious discontent grew, and the shah became more repressive, using his brutal secret police force to suppress opposition. This alienated students and intellectuals in Iran, and support for Khomeini grew. Discontent was also rampant in the poor and middle classes, who felt that the economic developments of the White Revolution had only benefited the ruling elite. In 1978, anti-shah demonstrations broke out in Iran’s major cities.

On September 8, 1978, the shah’s security force fired on a large group of demonstrators, killing hundreds and wounding thousands. Two months later, thousands took to the streets of Tehran, rioting and destroying symbols of westernization, such as banks and liquor stores. Khomeini called for the shah’s immediate overthrow, and on December 11 a group of soldiers mutinied and attacked the shah’s security officers. With that, his regime collapsed and the shah fled.

The shah traveled to several countries before entering the United States in October 1979 for medical treatment of his cancer. In Tehran, Islamic militants responded on November 4 by storming the U.S. embassy and taking the staff hostage. With the approval of Khomeini, the militants demanded the return of the shah to Iran to stand trial for his crimes. The United States refused to negotiate, and 52 American hostages were held for 444 days. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi died in Egypt in July 1980.

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Tito is made president of Yugoslavia for life

Year: 1963

Month Day: April 07

On April 7, 1963, a new Yugoslav constitution proclaims Tito the president for life of the newly named Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Formerly known as Josip Broz, Tito was born to a large peasant family in Croatia in 1892. At that time, Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in 1913 Broz was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. After the outbreak of World War I, he fought against Serbia and in 1915 was sent to the Russian front, where he was captured. In the prisoner-of-war camp, he converted to Bolshevism and in 1917 participated in the Russian Revolution. He fought in the Red Guard during the Russian Civil War and in 1920 returned to Croatia, which had been incorporated into the multinational but Serb-dominated kingdom of Yugoslavia.

He joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and was an effective organizer before his arrest as a political agitator in 1928. Released from prison in 1934, he rapidly rose in the ranks of the CPY and took the name Tito, which was a pseudonym he used in underground Party work. He went to the USSR to work with Comintern–the Soviet-led international Communist organization–and in 1937-38 survived Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purge of the CPY leadership. In 1939, Tito became secretary-general of the CPY.

In 1941, Axis forces invaded and occupied Yugoslavia, and Tito and his communist partisans emerged as the leaders of the anti-Nazi resistance. In 1944, Soviet forces liberated Yugoslavia, and in March 1945 Marshal Tito was installed as head of a new federal Yugoslav government. Non-communists were purged from the government, and in November 1945 Tito was elected Yugoslav premier in an election limited to candidates from the communist-dominated National Liberation Front. The same month, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, comprising the Balkan republics of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Macedonia, was proclaimed under a new constitution.

Although the Yugoslav republics were granted autonomy over some of their affairs, Tito held the ultimate power and ruled dictatorially, suppressing opposition to his rule. He soon came into conflict with Moscow, which disapproved of his independent style, especially in foreign affairs, and in early 1948 Joseph Stalin attempted to purge the Yugoslav leadership. Tito maintained control, and later in 1948 the CPY was expelled from Cominform, the confederation of Eastern European communist parties. Isolated from the USSR and its satellites, Yugoslavia was courted by the West, which offered aid and military assistance, including an informal association with NATO. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Yugoslav-Soviet relations gradually improved, but Tito was critical of the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and attempted to develop common policies with countries unaligned with the United States or the USSR, such as Egypt and India.

In 1953, Tito was elected Yugoslav president and was repeatedly re-elected until 1963, when his term was made unlimited. Although he used his secret police to purge political opponents, the average Yugoslavian enjoyed more freedoms than the inhabitants of any other communist country in Eastern Europe. Tito died in May 1980, just a few days before his 88th birthday.

After the collapse of communism in 1989, ethnic tensions resurfaced, and in 1991 the Yugoslav federation broke apart, leaving only Serbia and Montenegro remaining in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In 1992, civil war erupted over Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s attempts to keep ethnically Serbian areas in other republics under Yugoslav rule. In March 1999, NATO began airstrikes against the Milosevic regime in an attempt to end genocide in Kosovo and enforce the area’s autonomy. In October 2000, Milosevic was ousted in a popular revolution. He was then arrested and charged with crimes against humanity and genocide. He died on March 11, 2006, in prison in the Hague, before his trial ended.

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Kidnapped grandson of Getty billionaire found

Updated:: Jul 27, 2019
Original:: Mar 4, 2010

Year: 1973

Month Day: December 15

Jean Paul Getty III, the grandson of American billionaire J. Paul Getty, is found alive near Naples, five months after his kidnapping by an Italian gang. J. Paul Getty, who became the richest man in the world in 1957, had initially refused to pay his 16-year-old grandson’s $17 million ransom but finally agreed to cooperate after the boy’s severed right ear was sent to a newspaper in Rome. He eventually secured his grandson’s release by paying just $2.7 million, the maximum amount that he claimed he was able to raise.

Born in Minneapolis in 1892, Getty inherited a small oil company from his father. Through his autocratic rule and skillful manipulation of the stock market, Getty soon shaped Getty Oil into a massive financial empire. By 1968, Getty’s fortune exceeded $1 billion. However, the world’s wealthiest man did not live an ideal life. He is remembered as an eccentric billionaire who married and divorced five times and had serious relationship problems with most of his five sons.

In the final 25 years of his life, Getty lived near London, England, in an estate surrounded by double barbed-wire fences and protected by plainclothes guards and more than 20 German shepherd attack dogs. He was also a notorious miser–his installation of a payphone for guests in his English mansion is a famous example. Three years after failing to pay his grandson’s ransom in a timely manner, J. Paul Getty died at the age of 83.

His children and former wives fought bitterly over the inheritance of his fortune in court, but ultimately the bulk of his billions went to the J. Paul Getty Museum “for the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge.” Today, the Getty Museum, based in Los Angeles, is the most richly endowed museum on earth.

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