HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Shawn Micallef takes a look at the story of the CN Tower, which turns 40 Monday,
Happy birthday, CN Tower! You look as futuristic and strange as when you opened to the public 40 years ago tomorrow, on June 26, 1976.
A great 1976 view of the tower can be had today from Trinity-Bellwoods Park, where the tree line obscures the other downtown buildings so it’s alone on the horizon. When the tower opened it was isolated, many blocks away from the then-tiny cluster of downtown buildings at King and Bay Sts., and surrounded by industrial railway lands and a sea of parking lots.
Since then the skyline has crept over to the tower and wrapped around it, and its peculiar 1970s future-strangeness is as familiar to us now as Victorian houses. It doesn’t much matter that it isn’t the world’s tallest anymore; some other city needs the ego boost more.
Much of the public record of the CN Tower’s rise was captured by photographers such as the Star’s own Boris Spremo, who snapped it as it grew from a concrete stump to when “Olga,” the Sikorsky helicopter crane, lifted the final piece of the antenna into place.
The CN Tower story is usually about its superlatives, “tallest freestanding” and all that, but there are many more lesser known stories behind it, including those of the people who built it. One of Spremo’s most famous photographs is of two ironworkers sitting on a beam without a harness.
Also doing this dangerous work were a large contingent of Iroquois ironworkers who helped build the tower, as they did skyscrapers and bridges across North America.
One man has made it his life’s work to compile more of the stories of the 1,537 people who built the tower, from the bean counters to the guys pouring cement at 1,000 feet.
“The engineering history of the CN Tower has been overlooked, unlike London’s Tower Bridge, the Eiffel Tower or the World Trade Center,” says Robert Lansdale. “As for the people who built it, their history has been swept under the rug.”
A self-proclaimed “CN Tower kid” who was “always down there watching it go up” in the early 1970s, Lansdale says he has spent 5,000 to 6,000 hours compiling and recreating a visual history of the Tower’s design and construction “as if it’s being done today.”
By “today” he means the way so much of our world is documented from multiple angles by multiple people on social media channels, often with high quality photographs.
For Lansdale, it’s meant years of scouring both public and private archives for pictures, many of them rarely seen, behind-the- scenes views. Along the way, he collected many stories too for a project he calls “the impossible dream.”
“This is really about people, not the tower,” he says. “That’s just concrete.”
One of those stories is about the crane operator Winston Young who formed a Toronto folksinging duo with his wife Mary Jane in the late 1960s before arriving at his perch at the top of the tower.
In 1974, Young helped an ironworker daredevil called Sweet William climb to the end of the crane and parachute off. Mary Jane even wrote a song called “The Ballad of Sweet William” about the event along with an animated video, now on YouTube.
Another of Lansdale’s stories includes a quote from Franz Knoll, the tower’s structural engineer. “It was built using slide rules, human drafting, no computers, no precedents,” said Knoll to Lansdale.
Altogether the photos and stories get at the enormous complexity of building the CN Tower in the early 1970s. Right now Lansdale has posted the “first two feet of a 1,000-foot submerged iceberg” of his photos on his flickr.com webpage. (Search for them by his username RCL9.)
He thinks he has five to 10 more years’ work left to do, though he’s unsure what to do with the project when he’s done. It could be a book, but it also could be a Ken Burnsstyle documentary. Somebody who makes those kinds of things should ring him up.
Maybe it’ll all be ready for the CN Tower’s 50th birthday. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef