‘Tilt!’ puts brave visitors over the edge
CHICAGO — Step into the new Tilt! attraction on the 94th floor of the John Hancock Center and, at first, nothing happens. You are holding big metal bars. You are peering through a full-length window. But you know what is about to occur, and your insides, you are not ashamed to say, feel like a crowded butterfly garden.
And then there’s a sound — like an airliner’s engine at the gate — and the eight-window chunk of wall you are clinging to begins to move.
You and the wall and the other fools at the other windows are pitched slowly forward, and you begin to think about your mortality and America’s long legacy of engineering successes. You think about the city elevator inspectors who evaluated this thing, and you wish that one of them were here alongside you, his presence the most reassuring safety certificate of all.
Once upon a time in tourism, a commanding view from on high was attraction enough. But recent years have seen an escalation in the race to induce vertigo.
Operators at the Grand Canyon and the Willis Tower in Chicago have installed glass overhangs so that visitors can step out past precipices. And now there is Tilt!
At 20 degrees from vertical, your body tells you it should be falling. Looking down, you see your presumptive target: Chestnut Street, or, with the right wind and a bit of a leap and a soar, the top of the Water Tower Place building across the street.
This feeling, you imagine, is why it is better to watch the rooftop chase scenes at the beginning of James Bond movies than to participate in them.
At 30 degrees, the full extension of Tilt!, you take it all in, slowly acclimating to this challenge to your equilibrium.
Where once you thought “yikes” or “zounds” — or whatever word you use to express wide-eyed amazement tinged with fear — now you are beginning to take in the city that spreads beneath you: the actual Water Tower that survived the Great Chicago Fire, Michigan Avenue, the park behind the Museum of Contemporary Art.
This view, as you are pitched forward like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, extended out over 1,000 vertical feet of air, is breathtaking. It could be the fresh perspective on familiar places stealing your wind, but it is more likely the result of your lizard brain telling you that your body, right now, is supposed to be plunging into those well-known locales.
But your human brain is winning the argument. This is safe. This is well-thought-out, by people who know how wind, metal, glass and hydraulics behave. This is, really, very cool.
Tilt! — the new name for the old John Hancock Observatory — makes a bold move toward being better at putting metaphorical lumps in tourists’ throats than any other place in town.
There’s the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, combining vintage charm with modern height. There’s the Ledge, the single name for the four glass boxes that jut 4 feet out from the western wall of Skydeck at the Willis Tower, still a potent threshold to cross, almost five years after it opened.
But Tilt! does something new.
It is a box of steel, 31,000 pounds of it, powered by a hydraulic motor and three big pistons known as hydraulic actuators.
Just as the Hancock wears its support pieces like a bandit’s guns, on the outside, visitors to Tilt! can see the giant nuts and bolts and the heavy beams doing the work of keeping them safe.