The New Yorker:

By Charles Bethea 

The free-solo climber Alex Honnold, who made it to his fortieth birthday last year, despite certain vocational hazards, once invited me on a scouting trip. The objective was to climb—without ropes, a harness, or a parachute—a sixty-nine-floor luxury apartment building in Jersey City, New Jersey, called the Urby. The building resembles “a rickety tower of Jenga blocks,” as I wrote in the first of two dispatches from Honnold’s 2018 Garden State adventure. “The edges are like the width of this fork,” he told me, referring to the building’s windowsills, which he’d balance upon. “Adequate, not great.” The Urby’s construction supervisor, a hefty “Sopranos” kind of guy, brought in to help suss the route, had warned Honnold not to grab any hvac units, noting, “This was built by a bunch of union guys who might have been hungover. You never know how something was fastened.”

The hardest part of the climb for Honnold wasn’t loose cooling units, though. It was his unexpectedly intimate view of the building’s residents, who had not been forewarned of his plan. “I have a vivid memory of passing a couple people sleeping where my foot was literally eight inches from their head, just separated by the glass, and I’m trying not to drag it,” Honnold told me recently, when I called him to discuss the free solo he’ll be attempting today—weather permitting—of a hundred-and-one-story skyscraper in Taiwan known as Taipei 101. “That was one of the things with the Urby: it was harder to climb smoothly,” he added. “Taipei 101 is a little more flow-y.”

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