About Arthur Vance

Twenty-one years inside the core

I started in the elevator trade in 1982 as an apprentice mechanic in a four-storey office building on Bay Street. By 1990 I had my Class A hoistway licence and was working on high-speed traction elevators in the financial district. In 2003 the company that maintains the six glass-fronted lifts inside Toronto’s 553-metre tower offered me a full-time inspection contract. I took it and spent the next twenty-one years riding those cars, scanning their cables, checking guide-rail bolts, and learning how a hexagonal concrete shaft behaves in a January gale.

What the job taught me

Most people visit the observation deck for thirty minutes, take photos, and leave. I spent full shifts inside the shaft with a magnetic-flux scanner, a torque wrench, and a thermos of coffee. I watched the tower move in wind, felt the tuned mass dampers kick in during storms, and learned exactly what happens when a 120 km/h gust shoves a glass-fronted car sideways on its rails. The building is extraordinarily well engineered. The redundancy in every system—cables, brakes, power supply, grounding—is deeper than anything I saw in forty years of elevator work.

Why I wrote these notes

After I retired in 2024, friends and neighbours kept asking me the same questions: “Is the glass floor safe?” “What if it’s foggy?” “Is the upper pod worth the extra fare?” I found myself writing long text messages full of numbers and advice. Eventually my daughter suggested I put the whole thing on a website so I could stop repeating myself. This is that website.

What this site is not

This site is not a ticket shop, a booking engine, or an official resource. I do not sell anything, accept payments, or earn commissions. I have no commercial relationship with the tower operator, any ticket reseller, or any tour company. The information here comes from my professional experience and publicly available sources. I update the pages when I learn something new or when policies change.

A note on accuracy

I have done my best to make these notes accurate as of the date shown in the footer. Operating policies, ticket formats, and restaurant menus change without notice. If you spot an error or an outdated detail, I would appreciate a note through the contact page so I can fix it.