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Watch: Russian couple climbs atop Empire State Building in proposal stunt, gets arrested
The two extreme urban climbers illegally ascended the needle of the New York landmark, where one proposed to the other, 1,450 feet above the city
- PUBLISHED: Thu 2 Jul 2026, 8:26 AM UPDATED: Thu 2 Jul 2026, 6:11 PM
As if the Knicks, the World Cup, Taylor Swift's possible wedding and the 250th birthday of the nation were not enough, the ceaseless spectacle that is the summer of 2026 in New York City entered the stratosphere, more or less, on Wednesday morning.
Two extreme urban climbers illegally ascended the needle of the Empire State Building, where one proposed to the other, 1,450 feet above the city.
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The couple, Angela Nikolau, 33, and Ivan Beerkus, 32, unfurled a large black banner that read “When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace,” and Nikolau posted a video on Instagram that showed a vertiginous view from a terrifyingly tiny platform.
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Another image posted by Nikolau shows Beerkus getting down on one knee. In still another, she shows off a ring, against a backdrop of high-rises far below.
Body camera footage posted by the New York Police Department shows what happened next.
An officer from the Emergency Service Unit climbs a steep, caged-in ladder up toward the couple. “Hello, how you doing?” he says. “Can you just stay where you are?” He adds, “You can’t be up here.”
Nikolau raises her arms and says, “I’m OK,” as one officer takes her by the arm and another prepares to apprehend Beerkus.
Both were arrested, the police said, and Nikolau 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 Wednesday what charge, if any, Beerkus would face.
It was far from their first ascent. The couple, who are from Russia, were the subjects of a 2024 documentary, “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” about their romance and quest for thrills and fame. (Nikolau has more than 1 million Instagram followers.) 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, 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 famously 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 construction sites in China and Europe, sometimes with legal repercussions.
Reached by phone Wednesday, Petit, now in his late 70s, was unimpressed by the couple’s climb and seemed offended by the idea of being mentioned in the same article.
“I mean, how can you compare writing an opera in the sky, and then climbing a very high ladder and unfurling a banner?” he asked.
Although Petit himself brought along confederates to photograph his feat, he decried the current emphasis on creating viral content, rather than timeless art.
“We all take selfies, and we forget to look, we forget to smell, we forget to hear,” he said. “We are now, you know, the toys of modern media.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.