Couple climbs needle of Empire State Building

NEW YORK — A couple known for scaling tall buildings climbed to the top of the needle of the Empire State Building on Wednesday and unfurled a large black banner that flapped in the breeze, about 1,450 feet above the city.

The couple, Angela Nikolau, 33, and Ivan Beerkus, 32, were taken into custody after the stunt, according to a law enforcement official. Nikolau, according to a police document, was charged with burglary — defined in New York state as unlawfully entering a building with the intent to commit a crime. It was not immediately clear whether Beerkus was also charged.

Late Wednesday morning, Nikolau posted a video on her Instagram account that showed a vertiginous view from a narrow platform and that was captioned “Currently at the Empire State Building.”

The message on the banner read: “When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace.”

As they stood atop the skyscraper, Beerkus proposed to Nikolau, the law enforcement official said. A photo Nikolau posted to Instagram shows Beerkus getting down on one knee.

The law enforcement official gave Nikolau’s first name as Angelina and Beerkus’ surname as Kuznetsov, which appears to be his birth surname.

The couple were the subjects of a 2024 documentary, “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” about their romance and quest for thrills and fame. In 2022, they climbed Merdeka 118 in Malaysia, which is more than 2,000 feet tall.

The Empire State Building’s needle, which houses communications equipment and a very tall antenna, rises about 200 feet above the top floor of the building.

It is a surface that is not frequently scaled. In 1994, the French climber Alain Robert did so, according to the Guinness World Records website.

New York City’s skyscrapers and monuments, however, have long been magnets for climbers.

Their attempts have ranged from the modest to the truly harrowing.

In 1918, Harry Gardiner, nicknamed “the Human Fly,” climbed the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn; it is all of 80 feet high.

Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.

In 2008, after three people — one of whom was Robert — climbed the New York Times Building in a matter of weeks, the Times removed some of the horizontal rods that climbers had used to scale it.

In 2014, a teenager from New Jersey climbed to the spire of the Freedom Tower, which was built on the site of the twin towers.

Jason Barr, an economics professor at Rutgers University who has studied skyscrapers, said that the initial plans for the Empire State Building did not include a spire or antenna, but after the construction of the Chrysler Building, with its distinctive crown, the building was redesigned to include a mooring mast that would stretch into the sky.

“These spires are designed partly for aesthetic reasons but also partly for advertising reasons, like, ‘Look at the top of my building’,” Barr said.

In recent years, artists and exhibitionists have called their unsecured and usually illegal ascents “rooftopping,” documenting the climbs on social media. Aside from structures in New York and Malaysia, Nikolau and Beerkus, have ascended buildings and constructions sites in China and Europe, sometimes with legal repercussions.

But there have been sanctioned climbs of skyscrapers, too. In 2023, actor Jared Leto scaled 18 floors of the Empire State Building, from the 86th floor to the 104th floor, with permission, to promote a world tour for his band Thirty Seconds to Mars.

He performed one of the band’s songs from the 104th floor, an unofficial landing off limits to the public.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.