Anytime you see a guy hanging out a window with his bare hands you stop. Today, or 100 years ago. Well today you get to meet the man who is responsible for free climbing being illegal in cities today. Mr. Harry Gardiner. The Human Fly.
The caption on this photograph is doing most of the work: "Harry H. Gardiner, 52-year-old performer, climbs Hotel Bartram in Pennsylvania city for benefit to Veterans of Foreign Wars. He once topped Grant's tomb before former President Cleveland, who termed him 'human fly.' He is seen hanging from a window sill of the sixth floor."
I found it on page one of the Evening Star on July 5th, 1926. But the more I looked, the more I found. My first question, naturally, was did he die doing this. But I found much more than just the answer to that…
Gardiner had been in newspapers across the country for thirty years. He was everywhere — courthouse after courthouse, charity after charity, city after city — and the picture that emerged from all of it was something stranger and more specific than I expected.
How It Started
Harry Gardiner graduated from Columbia University intending to become a surgeon. That plan, for reasons he was characteristically oblique about in interviews, didn't work out. In a 1920 profile in the Morning Press, he described what happened next: "I began looking around for the impossible to do — something out of the ordinary which no man ever had done. This was way back in '94, when balloon ascensions..." He trailed off. The reporter didn't press him. What's clear is that by 1894, Gardiner had found his vocation, and it was vertical.
He started climbing buildings. Not with equipment — no ropes, no harness, no suction cups, nothing designed to keep a person alive at altitude. He used his hands. Specifically, he used three fingers of each hand: the index, middle, and ring. Never the thumb or little finger. "I depend almost exclusively upon the three middle fingers of each hand," he told the Morning Press. The illustrated close-up of his palms that ran with the article showed why — the three middle fingers had developed to an unusual degree, grouped together into something the reporter described as resembling a hook.
The name came from Grover Cleveland, or so the origin story went. Gardiner had climbed the flagpole atop Grant's Tomb in New York, and Cleveland — present in the crowd — reportedly gave him the name on the spot. Whether Cleveland said it exactly or whether Gardiner, who had a showman's instinct for a good story, helped it along over the years, it stuck. From 1894 forward he was the Human Fly, and the name was worth money.
The Business of It
Gardiner's operation was more sophisticated than it looked from the street. He worked under the auspices of charities and civic organizations — the American Legion, the Elks Patrol, the Red Cross, veterans' groups, children's funds — which gave each climb a moral frame and helped manage the crowds. The organizations got publicity and donations. Gardiner got a fee and a front-page photograph. The arrangement ran for decades.
The 1917 advertisement in the Chronicle Tribune is a good example of how it was packaged: a full page, three dramatic action photographs, the name given by the President of the United States, and at the bottom, almost in small print, the note that a collection would be lifted for the Legion Building Fund and you were asked to be liberal when the hat was passed. The event began at 7 p.m. with a band concert. The climbing exhibition was at 7:30. "All May See. Don't Forget the Date — TONIGHT."
In Houston in March 1918, the Chronicle reported he had already climbed the Chronicle building earlier that week and was now preparing to scale the thirteen-story Texas Company Building. A searchlight would illuminate every detail of the climb for the crowd below. The paper noted he fasted on the day of a climb — "wheatless, meatless, eatless" — going at least fourteen hours without food. It also mentioned, almost in passing, that Mr. Gardiner was planning to retire soon and that the Houston climb would be his last appearance in the city.
He did not retire.
In San Antonio in 1924 — six years after the Houston "farewell" — he was climbing the St. Anthony Hotel at age 54 for the children's Milk and Ice Fund, with the Elks Patrol managing the crowds. A physician had recently examined him and found his heart action, blood pressure, and other measures were normal for a man nineteen years his junior. The San Antonio paper noted that "Harry Gardiner believes that climbing has cheated Father Time."
By 1926, when the Evening Star photograph ran, he was 52 — or 54, or 55, the papers disagreed on his age throughout his career, and Gardiner himself seemed uninterested in settling the question. He was at the Veterans of Foreign Wars benefit in Philadelphia, hanging off the sixth floor of the Hotel Bartram, still at it.
What He Said About It
The most complete account of Gardiner's method and thinking appeared in the Anderson Herald in 1916, in a block of quotations the paper ran under the heading "SAYINGS OF 'THE HUMAN FLY'":
"People gasp at the risk I take. They need not if they knew the precision with which I judge my grip and the control I have of my mind. Twenty per cent of my risk is physical — a slip, a misstep. Eighty per cent of my risk is mental — that, for instance, should I lose my head. I have so trained myself that when I start up a building, I am deaf, dumb and blind to everything aside from my work. 'How they cheered you!' my manager has said when I reached the top. 'Did they?' I used to answer. I had not heard them — my mind was riveted on my work. That is my contribution to American life — the demonstration of a monumental concentration of the mind."
The caption on the Anderson Herald photograph adds a detail that the quotation block doesn't: the day after Gardiner climbed the Allen County Courthouse in Fort Wayne, the building's janitor attempted to replicate the feat from the second story and broke both ankles.
That janitor is the thread that runs through the darker part of this story. Gardiner had imitators everywhere, men who saw the crowds and the newspaper coverage and concluded that what he did was something they could do too. In July 1915, the Springfield Leader and Press reported that Eugene Ahern, 35, of St. Louis — who had climbed the Jefferson Hotel, the courthouse, and other high structures a few months earlier — died at a city hospital from injuries sustained in a thirty-foot fall. He had been climbing the banisters of a rear staircase at a private residence, going hand over hand, when his grip loosened near the third floor. He fell to the brick pavement.
Ahern was one of many. By the early 1920s, the imitator deaths had prompted cities across the country to pass ordinances banning building climbing outright. Gardiner kept going, finding cities that hadn't yet gotten around to it.
The Mind
The 1920 Morning Press profile is the most revealing document I found. Gardiner had done the Park Row Building in New York. He had scaled the State Capitol. He had once fallen — from the dome of the Capitol — and broken several ribs, which he described as instructive. He climbed twice a week to stay sharp. He did thirty days of finger exercises before attempting a new building. He had developed the specific theory that fear was learned behavior, instilled by overprotective mothers, and that it could be unlearned through discipline.
"This scaling of buildings is 60 per cent physical energy and 40 per cent mental effort," he told the reporter. Then elsewhere in the same interview, the numbers shifted: "Twenty per cent of my risk is physical. Eighty per cent of it is mental." The math didn't quite add up either way, but the point was consistent. The body was a tool. The mind was the whole job.
He was a Columbia University graduate who had wanted to be a surgeon and instead spent thirty years hanging off the sides of buildings for veterans' charities and children's milk funds in cities across America, fasting all day beforehand, deaf to the crowd below, riveted on the few inches of wall in front of his face.
In January 1928, the Marshall News Messenger ran a portrait of him at 55, announcing he would climb the local courthouse on Friday the 13th — and that he planned to reach the statue on top. The benefit was for the Marshall Fire Department.
He was still at it, fourteen years after Houston's "final appearance," still fasting the day of the climb, still using three fingers of each hand, still deaf to the crowd.
He reportedly died at home in 1956 at the age of 89 — which, if accurate, means he outlived almost everyone who had watched him climb. The buildings are still there. Most of the crowds are not.
See you tomorrow. – Chris
Sources
Evening Star, Washington D.C., July 5, 1926
Anderson Herald, December 10, 1916
Morning Press, December 11, 1920
Chronicle Tribune, November 26, 1917
Houston Chronicle, March 7, 1918
The News, May 24 and May 26, 1924
Springfield Leader and Press, July 20, 1915
Marshall News Messenger, January 12, 1928