The People behind Canada's tallest building

This photo was taken from the top of SkyTower at 1 Yonge Street, 106 storeys above the waterfront, around the time the tower reached its final floor this past March. At 351.85 metres it is now the tallest building in Canada and the first residential building in North America to reach that height. The CN Tower is taller, but the city classifies it as a broadcasting tower rather than a building, so it sits in a different column. Hariri Pontarini Architects designed SkyTower and Pinnacle International is the developer.

The timing is worth looking at. This same month, the CN Tower turned fifty. It opened to the public on June 26, 1976, after more than 1,500 people worked roughly 40 months to build it. Half a century separates the two towers in this picture, the old record holder off in the distance and the new one under the photographer's feet, and both were raised by the same thing. Toronto construction crews, a great many of them immigrants, doing hard and dangerous work at height.

That is the part of a skyline that rarely makes the news. A tower like SkyTower is a concrete structure poured one floor at a time, in the wind and the cold, over the better part of five years. The crews doing that pour are members of LIUNA Local 183. The forming contractor on One Yonge is Premform, working with PERI's self-climbing formwork, and the forming sector in this city bargains its collective agreement through Local 183, the same union that trains Toronto's high-rise form setters and fly-form crews. They are not the only trade up there. The crane in the corner of the frame is run by an operating engineer from IUOE Local 793, and a building this size also leans on carpenters, ironworkers and electricians. But the structure itself, the floors you would be standing on at the top, is largely the labourers' work.

It is worth knowing who they are. LIUNA Local 183 is the largest construction local union in North America. It began in 1952 with a few hundred members and today represents more than 70,000 people across southern Ontario. Its history runs straight through the city's immigrant communities. For years it was led by a Portuguese-born welder named Tony Dionisio, and it was Portuguese and Italian families who poured much of postwar Toronto, with newer arrivals carrying that work forward today. If you grew up around the trades here, none of this needs explaining. You already know the people in those crews.

Which brings it back to the flags planted along the edge of the slab, Portuguese and Canadian among them. Raising the flag of the country you came from when a building tops out is an old habit on Toronto sites, and it is a fair summary of how the skyline actually gets built. The render gets the credit. A crew gets the concrete to the top.

Photos: Kotsy Photography.