Column: Remembering when Dan Goodwin, aka Spider-Dan, touched Chicago's sky

He came.

He saw.

He climbed.

And in so doing, the life of Dan Goodwin would never be the same, and he would find a firm spot on any list of important Chicago figures, a colorful and compelling character in this city that has hosted more than its share of swashbucklers and lunatics.

Those of us who remember Goodwin are older now, but it doesn't take much to be able to recall the May 25 Memorial Day in 1981, when Goodwin, dressed in a Spider-Man costume, rose above the city, climbing the 110 stories (1,454 feet) of what was then called the Sears Tower. He did this with the aid of a local guy named James Hackett, who helped him with a ladder, and despite strong winds and firefighter interference. He was arrested, wound up in jail for a couple of days and had a fancy meal at the Pump Room. He was fined $35, and any charges were dismissed.

Of that climb, he said, "I felt like I was floating in space." He says that still.

And so, a few months after Sears, he was at it again, on the other side of downtown, climbing up what was then called the John Hancock Building and then the tallest residential building in the world.

It took him six hours, with firefighters spraying water at him until Mayor Jane Byrne and police superintendent Richard Brzeczek allowed him to continue to the top. He was arrested again, placed on a year's probation and told to avoid "public stunts."

He was on TV, discussed on newspapers' editorial pages. The newspapers began calling him "Spider-Dan." But he did keep a relatively low profile, not at all the taking advantage of whatever opportunities his notoriety might have popped up for him.

Some people thought he was nuts. Some people considered him a hero.

Mike Royko devoted a column to Goodwin, in which he wrote, "As a mature, level-headed, sensible, prudent adult, I have to agree with all the level-headed, sensible, prudent criticisms of Spider-Dan's climbs.

"But when I walked past the Hancock Wednesday morning and saw him way up there, inching his way to the top - boy, I wished I was doing it."

He called what Goodwin was doing "a fine madness…the kind of madness most of us don't have. So we stand on the sidewalk and cheer Dan and boo the fire chief."

A few days ago, I read Goodwin some of that column. He laughed a few times, and then he said, "Mike understood that those climbs weren't just about the physical feat, but about a specific kind of freedom."

He was young then, 25 years old, born and raised "on the quiet shores of Cape Porpoise, Maine," a talented rock climber who did so at various spots across the country before landing in, of all places, Las Vegas, where he had a wife and a son, and worked as an acrobat in a show called "The Portrait of Dorian."

A life-changing event for him was the fire that he watched on Nov. 21, 1980, as the massive MGM Grand hotel burned. It was a horrible blaze and fatal, displaying the fire department's inability to rescue hotel guests as 85 people died. He believed that his climbing experiences might contribute to a plan to rescue the trapped people. He presented such a plan to a fire chief who told him, he remembers, "I needed to climb a building to learn of the dangers of high-rise firefighting and rescue." That was one of the reasons he decided to come to Chicago and climb. His Spider-Man costume was made by a costume designer at Caesar's Palace, and he bought a one-way plane ticket here.

Goodwin is older now too, a very fit and silver-haired 71-year-old living in a place called, appropriately I suppose, Mountain View in California with wife Cynthia and their dog, a four-year-old Labradoodle named Ruby. He long ago created what he calls the Skyscraper Defense Act and will discuss it anytime.

He says, memories flowing, "I love Chicago," which, of course, is where the skyscraper was created when architect/engineer William LeBaron Jenney's Home Insurance Building rose at the northeast corner of LaSalle and Adams Streets in 1885. It was 10 stories tall.

After his climb here, Goodwin climbed other buildings around the world, including the North Tower of the World Trade Center in 1983 (110 stories). He did most of these using only hands and feet, ropes and suction cups.

He also started giving motivational speeches and began a successful career in the construction business. In 2000, he was diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer. While successfully fighting that disease, he started writing, and the compelling result is spread across the 500-some pages of his three-part memoir, an autobiography titled "Untethered," which is scheduled for formal publication on May 25, the 45th anniversary of you-know-what. "It just seemed right," he says.

He is still active, climbing inside walls as a slight concession to aging. He has an adult son, Keeya, and a couple of grandkids, and they take up some time, as does a network of old climbing pals. And now, he has the book. It is a story think with details and self-awareness. Here's a bit.

"In the aftermath of the MGM Grand fire, an event that left a watermark of smoke and mortality on the city's soul, my life fractured. I began to move between two incompatible worlds, a man split in two. One half of me belonged to the unvarnished truth of the earth - a father and a climber, defined by the clean grit of granite and sandstone, and the weight of my son's hand in mine. That world was a sacred duty, a purpose rooted in the boy who grounded me and the vertical wilderness I craved."

There is more, a lot more. There is also Stan Lee, the creator of Spider-Man, with whom Goodwin became close friends after his Sears climb and who remained close until Lee's death in 2018. Lee writes in the book's foreword, "Spider-Dan (as the media dubbed him) is far more than a publicity-seeking opportunist. There has been an unflagging, altruistic purpose to his widely heralded, attention-getting climbs. … Aware of the fact that America's skyscrapers are, and always will be, vulnerable to future terrorist attacks, Dan Goodwin has devoted his time and his fame to sponsoring the world's first Skyscraper Defense Act."

Goodwin will tell you that he has had "a life lived on the edge." He will also tell you his book is "part thriller, part history lesson. … More than a memoir, this is a manifesto for survival."

Which reminds me of something he said during the long ago days when he was climbing up Chicago skyscrapers, "If I was going to die, I was going to die on my own terms."

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.

This story was originally published May 19, 2026 at 9:52 AM.