Climbing skyscrapers from the ground up was Harry Gardiner’s specialty in the early 20th century
Before Spiderman, there was the Human Fly
On a late summer day in 1916, crowds watched a man climb to the ninth-floor window of a skyscraper and open a savings account. He wasn’t a maniac, no, the event was planned. Thousands that week witnessed the world-famous Harry Gardiner as he scaled two new Grand Rapids skyscrapers, using no special equipment but a short length of rope. It was but one of many enthusiastic receptions he would receive over his popular two-decade-long, 700-building career. Yet in the less than a decade, Harry Gardiner would disappear, dying under still unknown circumstances.
The sensational and now-obscure career of Harry Gardiner presents a snapshot of his time. The phenomenon of a legal celebrity climber was made possible by conditions particular to the early 20th century: a strong taste for live public spectacle, the dawning age of skyscrapers, and laws lax enough to permit such dangerous performances. Gardiner’s popularity would even grow so large as to help end what he started. He inspired an army of conspicuous copycats who were less talented than he, and after multiple deaths, states and cities finally placed official restrictions on the practice of urban climbing.
Gardiner was born in New York in 1871. Records show he began climbing in 1905, when he was in his thirties. The climb that made him famous was up the 159-foot flagstaff atop Grant’s Tomb in New York. Gardiner would later claim that Grover Cleveland was in the audience that day, and it was he who suggested the name “fly” to Gardiner. Whether this tale was true, or perhaps more likely, a deliberate fabrication, the name stuck. After that, he would be known as Harry “The Human Fly” Gardiner.
Gardiner was said to have had a natural advantage by virtue of his exceptionally strong hands, but he was also a committed and somewhat hammy performer. With his bright smile and round glasses, the Human Fly knew how to put on a show — for the camera, the crowd, the papers, for the businesses that paid his checks. He posed for sensational photographs, like one where he’s holding onto the precipice of a building with only one arm, holding out his hat with another. He often wore white outfits so the masses below could still see.
And Gardiner made money, chiefly bankrolled by corporations who had invested in expensive new structures and wanted to promote them. The Grand Rapids bank account stunt, for instance, was funded by two companies, the Herpolsheimer Company and the Grand Rapids Savings Bank. He also promoted a Detroit newspaper’s new advertising office. In 1918, he took a break while climbing the Bank of Hamilton building in Ontario to pop his head in and take out a life insurance policy (quite necessary, it would seem). Two weeks earlier, he scaled the 17-story World building in Vancouver and entered. He returned to address the crowd outside with a plug: “Buy Victory Bonds and more Victory Bonds for the completion of the Allied victory that now looms up through the world nightmare of the past four years.”
Gardiner’s performances resonated with his audience. In 1915, he caught the attention and sympathy of the renowned writer Sherwood Anderson in Virginia, who watched rapturously as Gardiner faced the taunts of the audience, which whistled and jeered at him as he showed his exhaustion. He drew in enormous crowds in Europe and North America, adding theatrical grandeur to the new innovation of the skyscraper, with 30,000 people assembling to watch him climb buildings in both Omaha and Alabama.
Gardiner’s greatest brush with death came in 1915, when he made an effort to climb the state capitol in Columbia, South Carolina. He fell 51 feet, breaking multiple ribs and rendering significant damage to the ceiling. Like all daredevils, he sought to vindicate himself by trying the feat again. He did, in 1922, but only after the state legislature passed a bill exempting them from responsibility for death or structural damages.
It didn’t take long for the copycats to appear. Gardiner had many imitators, who profited not only from the promotional business model he enjoyed, but from his name as well. Soon there were a half dozen “human flies,” including Henry Roland, George Polley, and Bill Strothers, who performed for films and scaled exteriors to promote new banks, hotels, and more.
Soon enough it became clear just how dangerous this new profession—call it “buildering”—had become. In 1914, one 20-year-old human fly fell to his death in San Francisco. Then, in 1923, a man fell nine stories from the Hotel Martinique in New York City. In the wake of his death, the city council outlawed “street exhibitions of a foolhardy character in climbing the outer walks of buildings by human beings.” The law sought to “prevent performance in which human life is needlessly imperiled to satisfy either . . . an insane desire for vainglory or money on the part of those directing or executing that sort of exhibition.”
As for Gardiner, it is hard to know where he went. Records show that he climbed the Princess Martha hotel St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1925. But he disappeared soon after. However, Michael Largo, author of The Portable Obituary, brings attention to a man found bloodied and dead at the base of the Eiffel Tower a couple years later. He supposedly fit Gardiner’s description. But the Human Fly’s fate is still a mystery.
