This 65-year-old steeplejack saw Kansas City from its City Hall flagpole

That wasn’t Spider-Man climbing high above downtown Kansas City’s 29-floor City Hall building on Tuesday.

It was a 65-year-old California man who travels around the country repairing sky-high structures — TV towers, stadium lights, flagpoles.

Jim Phelan, a third-generation steeplejack, learned the death-defying trade from his father, who learned it from his father, an Irish immigrant who scaled church steeples. His business is uphigh.com.

When City Hall’s flagpole ropes busted two weeks ago, maintenance supervisor Daynon Arrington couldn’t find a steeplejack in Kansas City. A brave tree trimmer offered to take the job, “but I don’t think he had the insurance,” Arrington said.

After asking around, Arrington heard about Phelan, who was in Kansas City seven years ago to repair the Commerce Tower flagpole.

The city hall job paid $2,500 — including Phelan’s travel costs from the San Francisco Bay area — and took about an hour and a half.

On Tuesday morning, Phelan donned a red helmet and harness and wrapped a pair of sturdy slings tight around the 80-foot flagpole on the roof of City Hall. He sat in a boatswain’s chair — a skateboard-sized seat attached to the harness — as he worked the slings up the pole one by one, inching higher and higher with one leg wrapping the pole and the other pressing into a horse stirrup.

Halfway up, the pole started to sway and the brass ball on top started to wobble like a marble balancing on a drinking straw.

“It’s making a lot of noise,” Phelan yelled down to the half-dozen maintenance men watching below. “It may be loose.”

The men slowly inched away from the pole. Arrington shivered and turned away.

“You can watch this?” he asked maintenance mechanic Tommy Santillan.

“I’m okay as long as it’s not me,” Santillan said.

Phelan said he respects heights but doesn’t fear them.

“Fear causes anxiety, and when you’re climbing, you need to be relaxed,” he said. “If there’s adrenaline running, that means something went wrong.”

Yoga keeps his mind and body strong and limber. Experience and preparation give him confidence.

Twenty minutes into Tuesday’s climb, Phelan got to the top of the pole and started repairing pulleys, re-stringing ropes and tightening the wobbly brass ball with a wrench. From the City Hall roof, he looked like an ant on a blade of grass. From the street, he was a speck on a stick.

“Usually on a big, big building, you’re invisible — nobody sees you,” he said.

After the pole was fixed, Phelan shimmied back down, and the maintenance workers fixed an American flag to the fresh white ropes. The job was pretty routine for the steeplejack, who has climbed 250-foot flagpoles in Texas and a 2,100-foot TV tower.

He often wears a GoPro camera on his helmet so he can take pictures while climbing.

On Tuesday, he saw the Bartle Hall pylons, the Power & Light building and Liberty Memorial veiled in a gray December fog. Trucks that looked the size of Matchbox cars hummed down the highways that intersect downtown.

For Phelan, being a steeplejack is more of a lifestyle than a job. He’s traveled to every major U.S. city and the Bahamas. He proposed to his wife atop the Golden Gate Bridge, and is teaching his 17-year-old son Kells the family business.

Jim said he hopes to keep working until he’s 75. When he was younger than his son, he was scaling 250-foot light towers that swayed with a light breeze.

“I remember being scared,” he said. “But you know what? That goes away.”

This story was originally published December 20, 2017 at 11:06 AM with the headline "This 65-year-old steeplejack saw Kansas City from its City Hall flagpole."