CN Tower: A Tower Built to Prove a Country

Stand at the base and look straight up, and the CN Tower stops being a postcard. It becomes a shaft of concrete that narrows into the cloud, and the first honest question is not how tall it is but why anyone would build it. The answer is stranger than the view. This tower was not the ambition of a hotel chain or a city booster. It was built by a railway, and it was built to make a point.

A railway that wanted to be believed

The "CN" stands for Canadian National, the railway that put the structure up. That fact reorders everything. A railway does not need a 553.3 metre (1,815.3 foot) communications and observation tower to run trains. It builds one to be believed.

In the early 1970s the argument Canadian National wanted to win was about industry. The country's tall buildings were rising fast, and the older transmission towers downtown were struggling to send clean signals past all that new glass and steel. A taller mast would fix the broadcasting problem. But Canadian National reached past the practical fix and built something that would demonstrate what Canadian industry could do, in concrete, at a height no one else in the world had matched. The tower is a communications structure and an observation deck, and it is also a company staking its reputation on the skyline.

Construction began on 6 February 1973. The work finished in 1976, and the tower opened to the public on 26 June 1976. From foundation to public opening is a little over three years for a structure that would go on to hold a world record, which tells you the confidence behind it.

The record it held for 32 years

For about 32 years, from 1975 to 2007, the CN Tower was the tallest free-standing structure in the world. That is not a decade of bragging rights. That is a generation. A child born the year the tower topped out could have finished school, started a career, and had children of their own before anything surpassed it.

What finally did was the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which passed the CN Tower's height on 12 September 2007. Two years later, in 2009, the tower also lost its narrower title of world's tallest tower to the Canton Tower in Guangzhou. So the CN Tower was overtaken not by a single rival but by the general rise of a taller century, first by a skyscraper in the Gulf, then by a tower in China. For a structure built to prove a point about industrial capability, being surpassed only after 32 years is close to the best outcome the argument could have hoped for.

It is worth sitting with the length of that reign as you look up. The tower was the tallest thing humans had built and left standing on its own, anywhere, for the entire time it takes a person to grow up.

A place built on a redundant rail yard

The ground under your feet is part of the story. The CN Tower stands on the former Railway Lands, a switching yard in the heart of downtown Toronto where trains were sorted and shuffled. By the early 1970s that yard had become redundant. The land was too valuable and too central to keep as sidings, and Canadian National had a stretch of emptying ground exactly where the country's tallest structure could make the loudest statement.

So the tower is not only an object. It is a decision about what to do with a piece of the city that had outlived its first purpose. A railway that no longer needed the yard used it to build the thing that would carry the railway's name into the skyline. The rail yard did not disappear so much as it changed jobs, and the tower was the first proof of the change.

The tower kept adding ways to feel the height

A record-holding tower could have coasted on its number. This one kept finding new ways to make you feel it.

In 1994 the glass floor opened, a panel of thick glass 342 metres above the ground, so that standing over it you look straight down the tower's own drop. It is a simple idea and a hard one to actually stand on. The height stops being a figure on a plaque and becomes something your knees argue with.

Then in 2011 the tower went further. On 1 August 2011 the EdgeWalk opened, a hands-free ledge walk around the outside of the main pod, 356 metres up. You are harnessed to an overhead rail and you walk the rim in the open air, leaning out over the city with nothing between you and the drop but your own nerve. A structure built to be looked at had become a structure you could stand on the edge of.

If you want the full arc of how this ground came to hold the country's tallest structure, the walking tour picks up the story stop by stop across the old rail yard. And once you know the tower was a railway's argument, the survivor next door reads differently: the roundhouse that outlasted the yard is told in The Rail Yard That Survived, and both stops sit inside the Toronto walking tours hub for the city, with more context on Toronto itself.

So look up one more time. The number, 553.3 metres, is the easy part. The harder and better fact is that a railway built it on a yard it no longer needed to prove a country could, and then held the record for 32 years while everyone watched.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "CN Tower" (en.wikipedia.org)
• Roamer audio tour transcript, "CN Tower" (Toronto), stop 1