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Over a long winter in Kansas City, what else is there to do but climb a building?

By Ben Paynter 

At 5 feet 9 inches and compact, Jeremy Collins is built like a featherweight boxer. He has electric blue eyes and Popeye forearms scribbled with veins. Collins doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't cuss. He goes to church on Sundays in Lee's Summit.

But right now, commuting through the River Market in his silver Honda Civic, Collins has one serious problem with the world: the fact that everything seems compartmentalized, divided into streets and sidewalks and rules that no one will consider breaking.

He grips the steering wheel and turns hard-right, putting the car up over a curb and across the sidewalk. Ahead, a space between parked cars marks the pedestrian pathway's end, and he aims for it. He points his front bumper toward the makeshift exit and squints. He's slowing the car a bit, apparently calculating the distance, the speed or the inevitability of impact.

In a matter of seconds, Collins threads the 10-foot opening between hood and bumper, and his Civic lurches back to the street.

"I used to work down here," Collins says. "I know the area."

The area, according to Collins, has little to do with street signs or city planning.

It's about textures, he says. He likes to walk down here and feel the grit on buildings. Bricks are rough, concrete is dull, limestone crumbles in his hand and natural rock just plain rules.

Collins has been climbing it for the past ten years. As a freshman at Central Missouri State University, Collins took a weeklong road trip west and wound up settling in Tucson, Arizona, for four years. Since he came back in May 2000, he's grown serious about his sport. He went to California and ascended the highest point on Mt. Whitney's east face twice in one day. He climbed the 3,200-foot west face of Yosemite's El Capitan in one 27-hour push. He's logged 127 first ascents on previously unclimbed routes -- 116 of them in the Midwest.

When Collins worked in the River Market, he programmed Doonesbury and FoxTrot and Oliphant animations for Internet advertising companies. His images appeared daily on msnbc.com. When guests visited, he held conferences in a second-story SoHo office loft.

Downtown, people move at predictable right angles on busy schedules. They don't make much eye contact. Beyond Commerce Bank, the Transamerica building and City Hall, expansion measures outward, toward the suburbs, not in vertical feet. Rarely do people stop on the street to crane their necks and gape toward rooftops. But Collins doesn't just look at buildings; he reads them. Like directions in braille, the incongruities tell him where to go. And Collins wants to go up.

Spurred by the honking of leery drivers, Collins' car rockets from the River Market across the freeway and then follows a tangle of rusted railroad tracks along Seventh Street. He parks and exits quickly, walking toward his old office. It's not even 20 degrees outside, but Collins is excited, exhaling great cumulous puffs of breath.

There is a 1-1/2-inch gap between the SoHo Lofts and the parking garage next door. The ruler-straight indentation between buildings separates the sidewalk from the sky.So far, he's planned this reconnaissance mission perfectly. May Street is abandoned.

"This is something I've wanted to do for a long time," Collins says. "It's ridiculous how climbable people make buildings."

Planning is important. He will wear brightly colored insulation. His accomplice, Sean Burns, will stand in the street and feed him more than 100 feet of neon-orange rope. People will notice them, Collins says.

"And once they get their cell phones out, it's all over." Collins and Burns will have to move fast.

It's at least a 50-foot climb.

In Kansas City, the recorded history of building climbers is limited -- to one man. Twenty-six-year-old Gregory T. Sullivan of Overland Park scaled the forty-story Hyatt Regency Hotel on St. Patrick's Day 1982. Climbing without ropes, Sullivan stopped at the seventeenth floor to unfurl a large white sheet painted with a green shamrock, but he then grew tired. At the 33rd floor, he accepted a harness from police, who dragged him to safety.

Authorities charged Sullivan with disorderly conduct and trespassing, both misdemeanors, and released him on a $60 bond.

Sullivan wasn't the first to see buildings as makeshift mountains of glass and steel. George "The Human Fly" Willig climbed the 110-story north tower of the World Trade Center in 1977. Captured on videotape and broadcast to a worldwide audience, the stunt landed Willig on The Tonight Show, Good Morning America, and ABC's Wide World of Sports. Unwittingly, Willig had become both a celebrity and an anti-establishment champion. In 1997 he said the stunt had been provoked by a serious lack of self-confidence, but by then he'd inspired height-hungry copycats around the world.

In 1981, "Spider Dan" Goodwin (dressed in Spider-Man garb) scaled Chicago's Sears Tower, the world's second-tallest building; two years later, he went up the north tower of the World Trade Center. (In 1997, Goodwin tried a comeback, mounting the WTC's south tower, but authorities, fearing a terrorist threat, immediately stopped him.) And Frenchman Alain Robert usurped Goodwin's moniker in the mid-'90s when he started his campaign to climb all of the world's tallest buildings. At forty years old, he is still active and has scaled more than fifty skyscrapers. Robert never thought to climb in Kansas City, he tells the Pitch by e-mail. He wonders, "Is there any building?"

There is. And that's a good thing for Collins. As far as he's concerned, the city has only two decent natural climbing areas. One, a 40-foot mass of loose limestone along Cliff Drive, towers precariously close to the street. The other is a quarter-mile area for bouldering (climbing low to the ground without ropes) in Swope Park, where peaks measure, at most, 15 feet.

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