"Anything that is giant and manmade strikes me in an awesome way and calls me," Philippe Petit once said. In 1982, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York called too, with a job offer. They needed a man on a wire to inaugurate the resumed construction on the world's largest Gothic cathedral, which had been paused for 41 years.

The cathedral had stopped being built back in World War II as the Episcopal Dioceses of New York, at the time, felt a lavish structure would be symbolically inappropriate. To dedicate the new construction efforts, church officials named Petit an artist in residence and assigned him this "office" high above Amsterdam Avenue. Fred R. Conrad snapped this photo of the French high-wire aerialist as he walked 150 feet with a silver trowel along a tightrope on Sept. 29, 1982.