Two men impressed residents in the El Dorado building by managing to climb to the top of its twin towers, nearly 400 feet in the air.
Photo: Jeff French Segall
Jeff French Segall was in his apartment on West 90th Street Monday evening when his wife, Ricki, called for him to look out their 27th-story window. On top of the El Dorado’s twin towers, nearly 400 feet in the air, were two men balancing on the slender ziggurat peaks. Segall, a retired Spanish teacher and self-described “semi-professional” photographer, began to shoot with his Nikon D850, capturing a pink-hued sky and the climbers as they moved from one pose to the next, backs arched over the spire or standing pencil straight, all while recording themselves via selfie stick. The West Side Rag ran the spread the following morning, and news of the stunt hit the New York Post a few hours later. The building’s residents were just as stunned as the rest of the city. Some even got a little poetic when I asked them about the surreal episode. “All mankind aspires to fly,” said a 40-year resident of the El Dorado. “I have total admiration for these two young ones.”
The white-glove co-op’s management, however, did not. On Tuesday, it sent a letter to El Dorado’s residents calling the photos a hoax: The police had launched an investigation, they wrote, and determined the pictures were “deepfakes” that had been created “to mislead the residents and community and cause unnecessary panic.” (One does not want to cause unnecessary panic in a building where a two-bedroom, three-bath goes for nearly $5 million, and where former residents include Alec Baldwin, Bono, and the late art dealer Hester Diamond.) Segall was shocked. “I thought in my mind that probably the door people were going to get reamed,” he told me. “But I certainly never could’ve imagined that they were going to impugn my word — my good name!”
The building management in a letter to residents called this photo and others depicting the two men on top of the El Dorado “deepfakes,” before issuing a follow-up letter retracting the claim.
Photo: Jeff French Segall
Eager to defend his honor, Segall provided raw versions of the photos to the Post, which the tabloid determined to be genuine. The Rag’s loyal readership also shared their eyewitness accounts of the spectacle in the comments section. (One wrote that she had seen the climbers while en route to Trader Joe’s on West 93rd Street: “It was an incredible sight.”) Residents were equally suspicious of their building’s claim. Plus, as one told me, wasn’t Segall just a little too old to be “doing a fake thing.”
They were right. By that evening, the El Dorado’s co-op board president, Mark Schonberger, had started walking back the fake-news claims. He told the Rag that management had “perhaps prematurely” written off the photos as doctored. The next day, an official retraction was issued: The “incident did, in fact, occur, and we are now working with the relevant authorities to fully understand the circumstances.” (The climbers were still at large as of Thursday and, perhaps most mysteriously, their footage of the stunt has yet to surface.)
And on the matter of how they got up there, residents had their own theories, too: Security is tight in the building, with a 24-hour doorman and cameras, but the El Dorado currently has exterior scaffolding extending up to at least one of the towers while workers repair leaks and repoint the brickwork. “There’s a stairway that goes all the way up there, so obviously that’s what they did,” said resident Jenny Nilsson. Was she worried about safety after the towers had been breached so publicly? “I don’t think there’s any big security risk or anything like that,” she said, still marveling at the daredevils’ ascent. Or, as another unbothered El Dorado resident put it, they enjoyed the show of it all, though they’re sure some of their neighbors “with a lot of artwork and political ties take their security more seriously.”