'Man on Wire' had a close encounter with our man Mike Eisgrau

This blast from the past comes from our man in New York, Mike Eisgrau, just ahead of the Friday, October 9 release of the film “The Walk” about Philippe Petit’s mind-blowing 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers. Mike reached back to his days as a reporter for WNEW radio news to pull this one out of the archives.

110 stories above lower Manhattan, Petit had just completed what has been described as “the artistic crime of the century.” With his own feet firmly on the ground, Mike’s reporter’s instincts told him that Petit would be taken for a psychiatric evaluation prior to booking, so he scrambled over to Beekman Downtown Hospital and there was Petit, in the ambulance bay at the ER. This photo is actually a screen shot from James Marsh’s documentary film "Man on Wire.”