Where once you thought "yikes" or "zounds" - or whatever combination of "holy" and "(bad word)" you use to express wide-eyed amazement tinged with fear - now you are beginning to take in the city that spreads beneath you: the actual water tower that survived the Great Chicago Fire, Michigan Avenue, the park behind the Museum of Contemporary Art. As the mechanism pauses to let you take it all in, you are slowly acclimating to this challenge to your equilibrium. This feeling, you imagine, is why it is better to watch the rooftop chase scenes at the beginning of James Bond movies than to participate in them.Īt 30 degrees, the full extension of Tilt!, you could let go and become a giant bug on a giant windshield, except that, unlike such bugs, you would remain sensate. Your knuckles match the white in the nearby clouds. Looking down, you see your presumptive target: Chestnut Street, or, with the right wind and a bit of a leap and a soar, the top of the Water Tower Place building across the street. You, really, are in no position to argue.Īt 20 degrees from vertical, your body tells you it should be falling. And now there is Tilt!, officially opened to the public this month and billed as unique in the world. Operators at the Grand Canyon and the Willis Tower have installed glass overhangs so that visitors can step out past precipices. But recent years have seen an escalation in the race to induce vertigo. Once upon a time in tourism, a commanding view from way on high was attraction enough. You think, for some reason, about your sofa back home - comfy, welcoming, earthbound. You think about the city elevator inspectors who evaluated this thing, and you wish that one of them were here alongside you, his presence the most reassuring safety certificate of all. You and the wall and the other fools at the other windows are pitched slowly forward, and you begin to think about your mortality and America's long legacy of engineering successes. But you know what is about to occur, and your insides, you are not ashamed to say, are like a crowded butterfly garden.Īnd then there's a sound - think noisy dentist's office, or airplane engine at the gate -and the eight-window chunk of wall you are clinging to begins to quit its right-angle orientation to the massive skyscraper around it. You are peering through a full-length window. CHICAGO Step into the new Tilt! attraction on the 94th floor of the John Hancock Center and at first nothing happens.
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