The Flags at the Top

Look at the edge of the rooftop. Past the crane, past the formwork and the rebar and the blue porta-potty, there's a row of flags planted along the parapet — Portuguese and Canadian among a handful of others. This is 106 storeys up, at the very top of SkyTower at 1 Yonge Street, now the tallest building in Canada and the first residential building in North America to reach 106 storeys. RENX

Those flags aren't decoration. They're a tradition. When a crew "tops out" a tower — pours and ties the final floor — they raise the flags of the countries they came from. It's a signature written in the sky. A way of saying: we were here, we built this, and this is where we're from.

Stand at street level and you read a skyline as architecture — Hariri Pontarini's tapered glass form, a developer's pro forma, a render that finally became real. But the city in this photo wasn't designed into existence. It was built — floor by floor, in the cold and the heat, by people whose names will never appear on the building. And in Toronto, an enormous share of those people came here from somewhere else.

The crew at the top of a tower like this is almost certainly stacked with members of LIUNA Local 183 — the largest construction local union in North America. Founded in 1952, it now represents more than 70,000 workers across the Greater Toronto Area. Its story is the city's story: for years it was led by a Portuguese-born welder, Tony Dionisio, and it was built on the backs of the Portuguese and Italian families who poured the concrete of postwar Toronto — and, increasingly, on newer waves from every corner of the map. The union likes to call itself a cultural mosaic, which is just the polite institutional way of saying what anyone on a Toronto site already knows.

If you grew up around it, you know it in a different way. You know the people who work there — uncles, cousins, neighbours, family friends. You know the early alarms and the worn boots by the door, the pride that comes home with them. There's a quiet dignity in it that the city rarely thanks out loud: the understanding that you are, with your own hands, making the place everyone else gets to live in.

That's the part worth holding onto. We spend a lot of energy at Bloorgrove arguing about design, zoning, and what a good building should be — and we should. But a city is not only drawn and approved. It is built, by people who deserve to be seen as more than line items in a construction schedule. The quality we want in our buildings doesn't come from policy alone. It comes from people who care enough to do it right.

So the next time SkyTower catches the light from across the harbour, remember the photo. Remember the flags at the top — a dozen homelands crowning the tallest thing in the country. Toronto didn't just rise. Somebody raised it.

Photo: Kotsy Photography.