Inside Vancouver
Tower of Power
By Danielle Egan published Apr 2, 2008
Perched 216 metres above the corner of Thurlow and Georgia is a tiny "office" with a $17.6-million view of the city. To see what goes on in Vancouver's tallest perch-soon to be the city's loftiest, and most expensive, penthouse-I do something that only about a dozen people have done before: climb up a thin steel ladder anchored atop the Living Shangri-La hotel and residences. There's no safety line, only platforms at each of the crane ladder's five switchbacks. The ladder's mast sways. The building does, too.
The first stage isn't too bad. The Shangri-La is "topped off" at this 61st-floor rooftop patio, and the crane's mast is positioned at one corner of the building. But eventually I have to switch to the next set of rungs, facing west. There's six metres of concrete and rebar between the building's edge and my steel-toed boots (two sizes too big), but my frontal lobes have been hijacked by my reptile brain, specifically the hair-raising region. So this is how imminent death feels.
"No problem," coaxes my guardian angel Karen McRae, Ledcor's safety coordinator, as I reach the third platform. "You can do it," she adds, as if to reassure us both. The last thing she wants to do is call in the fire department and shut down a site that eats up a quarter-million dollars a day.
I persevere and we reach the top platform and crane operator John Nault's cab. The vibe is welcoming. Pink Floyd plays low on the CD player, and there's green tea brewing in a small coffeemaker and du Maurier cigarettes on offer. Weirdly, hanging on a thin stalk in the window is a juicy-looking red tomato. Nault says the plant sprouted out of the cab's dirt-dusted steel floor last summer. "I had no clue what it was at first," says the 47-year-old Ottawa native, who fed it green tea until fruit appeared. Its existence seems to challenge the idea that being up so high is unnatural.
