Two Men Scale New York Times Building

Two men, one a practiced French stuntman (above) known for climbing tall buildings & protesting global warming, the other a New Yorker who said he wanted to raise awareness of the dangers of malaria, scaled the 52-story New York Times Building in Times Square on Thursday just hours apart. Each was arrested when he stepped safely onto the roof. The first, Alain Robert, the Frenchman, went up the north face of the year-old skyscraper in the morning, unfurling a bright green banner near the top. The words on the banner were illegible from the sidewalk, but from office windows inside the tower the message could be clearly read: “Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week.” The other, identified by the police as Renaldo Clarke (below), 32, of Brooklyn, climbed the Eighth Avenue side starting about 6 p.m. Both climbers grabbed onto one of the building’s most distinctive features, the ladderlike horizontal rods that form an exterior curtain surrounding the floor-to-ceiling windows. And then, in turn, they were off on a hand-over-hand trip up the face of a New York skyscraper, with no ropes or harnesses, a trip that left the cellphone-camera-snapping crowds that swirled below thinking of Spider-Man, or maybe King Kong. “He was staring at me on the fourth floor,” said Kim Severson, a reporter for The Times’s Dining section, who saw Mr. Clarke pass by. “At first, I thought, ‘Is he a window washer?’ But he had no equipment. He turned and climbed up at a very rapid pace. He looked very focused. He looked very solemn and determined.”

The chief spokesman for the police, Paul J. Browne, said that Mr. Clarke, of Brooklyn, was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center for psychiatric evaluation after his arrest.
Click on the pictures to expand. Previous blog on Alain Robert.