Is He High? Photog Takes Dizzying Pics from Times Square Roof
New York photographer “Wanted Visual” shot a shoe selfie from the top of a hotel in Times Square. (Photo: Wanted Visual/Instagram)
By Billie Cohen
Put a tall building in a city and some adrenaline junkie is going to attempt to climb it. It’s just the way life is. Recently, a photographer in New York has been drawn into this hair-raising hobby, and the rest of us are getting some great pictures out of it.
Over the past few weeks, a Brooklyn-based photographer who calls himself Wanted Visual has been posting photos to his Instagram feed that show his feet dangling over the edge of the roof of the DoubleTree Hotel in Times Square, along with other shots from great heights.
The images are dizzying, as you’d expect from 60 floors up. But the snapper, who is identified solely as Eddie in a Daily Mail article, doesn’t seem phased at all. He’s quoted in the Daily Mail, saying “I definitely don’t get scared up there — if anything it’s more of an extreme adrenaline rush.”
(Photo: Wanted Visual/Instagram)
Eddie has apparently “rooftopped” some other hotels in NYC — including the Waldorf-Astoria and the Four Seasons — with the goal of sharing unique aerial photos of the city he loves. And while he has nerves of steel and an eye for a pretty panoramic, it’s worth nothing that his stunts follow in the footsteps of a long line of other infamous and more cringe-inducing daredevils — not that we are issuing any sort of challenge.
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(Photo: Wanted Visual/Instagram)
(Photo: Wanted Visual/Instagram)
In May, the Russian-Ukrainian duo On the Roofs climbed to the top of China’s Shenzhen Tower, the second-tallest skyscraper in the world, and filmed the whole thing. And even right here in NYC, the annals of adrenaline junkies have including many other bigger-risk-taking acrobats, including the French Spider-Man, Alain Robert, who free climbed his way up the 52-story New York Times building in 2008. Robert made his ascents, which also included the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, Tapei 101, and the Sears Tower, with a mission: to draw attention to global warming. He posted a banner at the tenth floor of the Times building that said “Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week.”
Eddie the hotel hopper doesn’t seem to have the same activist motivations, except maybe to increase his 14K Instagram followers. Though we like that he does have an aesthetic mission, which reminds us of the similarly artistic gift Philippe Petit gave to NYC back in 1974.
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With the help of a team of friends, Petit snuck into the Twin Towers early one August morning. Once at the top, they strung a high wire from one tower to the other, and Petit proceeded to walk across it — with no safety cable, no net, and just the help of a balance bar. Seeing as it was 1974, Petit didn’t have a phone to take a selfie or a humblebrag shot, but from all accounts it seems that if he had, we would’ve seen him smiling. He spent 45 leisurely minutes up there, making eight passes across and seeming completely at ease at the insane height of 1,350 feet. Everyone who looked up that day was amazed at what they saw.
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Eddie’s photos also radiate a little bit of that kind of magic, and although don’t condone any of this death-defying craziness, we will admit: We do love the photos.
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