Hot Art

The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company was founded in 1887 and its first president was also Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald. Ten years after its inception it expanded its operations to Asia, including China and Hong Kong. In 1999 the company began trading stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker ‘MFC, and the Philippine Stock Exchange, and the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (SEHK) under the ticker ‘945’. Today the corporation is called Manulife Financial and operates in 21 countries with over 24,000 employees. It is the largest insurance company in Canada, the second largest in North America and the fifth largest in the world. Its headquarters are located in First Canadian Place- a 72 story building in the heart of Toronto’s financial district

In the building that is First Canadian Place on Bay Street no less then 58 of the 72 floors were a place of infinite financial transactions coming and going from just about any nation in the world that numbered in the tens of billions of dollars. This was typical on any day at any time but particularly on this Friday in September. The news around the world was now nearly a week old that there was a massive financial breakdown in the US- Canada’s biggest trading partner by a huge margin- and the tension was nothing less than extreme. Elevators were constantly jammed with consultants and analysts, Blackberrys buzzed and hummed non stop and in a few hours time all the banks would be closed in the Eastern Time Zone meaning any meaningful transactions would have to wait until Monday morning. Since the collapse of the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.- the fourth largest financial bank in the world- it was all too real a possibility that Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley could follow. Contingency plans were found lacking as never has such an institution fallen before and with so many people and businesses relying on it, experts could only speculate the results. Finance was truly global and an important lynch pin had been pulled out.

The staff of the International Swaps and Derivatives Department on the 52nd floor were just one part of Manulife Financial- the company division responsible for investing and managing billions in funds and it took up all the floors between 43 to 57. This department was particularly over worked and coming to a tipping point. Some, in exhausted defeat had left hours earlier knowing that there was little they could do and they would be refreshed and alert to deal with the situation anew on Monday. Some didn’t even show today as they were sure they would not even have a job to come back to and thought “Fuck it. I haven’t seen my family for a week and now’s as good a time as any”. The corner offices and the more dedicated staff had no intention of leaving the floor that night or even all weekend. Their jobs depended on it and so did their livelihood and let’s face it, they put in long hours at first but with time came the perks, the bonuses, the cars, the boats the summer homes. There wasn’t any chance of turning back now.

On any typical day the staff of the 52nd floor would begin to stroll through the elevator doors on to a marble reception floor around 9 AM. The receptionist whom resembled a young Heidi Klum greeted each staff member personally from behind her large Maple desk; a huge modern oil painting hangs on the wall just to the left and three smaller ones but still quite large hang on the wall to her right flanking the smoky glass company insignia centered above her head. From there you would walk to the left or right through some very large, opaque glass doors that would lead to the open office area set up with cubicles for the forty or so lower level analysts. Both the left wing and the south wing were similar with about twenty or so associates working in this open environment lit up with designer light fixtures and working atop custom made, designer desks. Large flat screen TV’s hung from the walls every twenty feet or so tuned into CNBC or something of the like. All this open work area took up the majority of the floor and was framed with floor to ceiling windows facing East and West with respective views of Lake Ontario to the South, the Beaches and Scarborough to the East, Etobicoke and Mississauga to the West and the rest of Toronto and its gradual rise away from the Great Lake to the North. Their building was the tallest office tower in the country and their view was almost entirely unobstructed.

The windowless inner walls of the floor that housed the elevators and stairs in the core of the building were decorated with designer wallpaper and lined with pieces of antique wooden furniture that supported binders, lamps and porcelain coffee cups. A variety of post modern paintings were hung on these walls between the TV’s without any consideration for genre or time period but the utmost attention was paid to colour coordination. Each corner of the floor had two glass walled offices varying in size and opacity depending on executive level and tenure, each with a view that would not cease to inspire any one whom entered them.



In another world, just next door to First Canadian Place, the construction crews working on what was to be the tallest, and costliest residential tower in Canada, financed but non other than Donald Trump fresh off his most recent bankruptcy/rebound. The news around the site that day was the weather report and like anyone whom works outdoors for a living will tell you, they are all amateur meteorologist- meaning they’re professional meteorologists. From any number of sources of media; radio stations, newspapers, last nights news channel, to just a keen look to the sky- and some years of experience doing so, it was what was on the minds of the 42 personnel working on the early stages of that project that day. That, and it was Friday, so there was hope that the rain would clear for the weekend and hopefully forever, and come Monday the temperature would pick back up to the seasonal norm which should have been around 20 to 24 degrees Celsius. The fact that mid September is the best outdoor weather of the year in Toronto and the entire province of Ontario is an understatement when the summers often reach 30 plus degrees and are opressingly humid, and the winters are dark more than light, and cold- around minus 7-10 Celsius- and damp witch is worse than if it was really cold and dry because the cold gets into your bones so you never really do warm up until May. For a few weeks from mid September to mid October the weather is perfect and everyone knows it- especially those whom work outdoors. This Friday while the offices far above were frantic with the possibility of a financial apocalypse, the crew on the freshly formed 5th floor were suffering through drizzle and an unseasonably 12 degrees Centigrade.

This was no small project and the team of 42 were fully aware of it. The project manager’s name was Howard Rickman who spent 60 hours a week confined to the site trailer fielding emails and phone calls from any one of his three phones. Three radios that were in their respective charging holders just twelve inches from his laptop that sat front and centre on his desk, one of three Howard actually had surrounding the interior of his small trailer office, piled deep with giant blueprints and scamatics. A half dozen open four and five inch binders sat on those drawings accompanied with 20 or so loose memos of a few pages each, stapled together, representing Change Orders, Change Directives, Site Instructions and Requests For Information, more commonly referred to on site as CO’s, CD’s, SI’s and RFI’s. These were to be filed in to the large binders that would by the end of the project consist of about 10 volumes each, and reflected with a notation by hand onto the drawings and scamatics known as ‘as built’s’ that lined Howards desk.

Howard only answered to the company CEO and him only. He was there when the company was formed and helped it grow into the institution it is today but taking into account his background and his extraordinary abilities as a manager and superior intelligence, no one at the head office would feel up to the take of delegating to him anyway. Peter, the Site Supervisor, Lynn the Project Coordinator and Jason the assistant supervisor were the members of the crew whom answered directly to Howard. Under them came the Forman; Greg, whom lead one carpentry team and Terry whom led the other, both teams had around 7 crew members whom built the formwork for the slabs and columns that make up just about any modern concrete building that exists today. Howard Smith is the labour foreman overseeing 14 workers and all are under the keen, experienced eye of Peter whom in turn is being watched by Howard. Electrical, plumbing, rebar and mechanical crews round out the subcontractors that are on site for the next few months until the personnel on site would roughly double with the installation of finishes and the daily costs would increase ten fold. The entire project was budgeted at $280 million- an unpresentenced sum for a residential development in the largest Canadian city- and would, due to the circumstances that were unfolding currently and causing so much hysteria in the tower next door and so many others around it, blow up to $380 million and extend the project’s timeline by a year.

The epicenter of the site was where the tower crane was situated, operated by Pete, a smooth as cat shit operator that emigrated to Toronto from Liverpool in 1976, his accent thick enough to grate cheese, and only those whom have worked with him long enough to understand every syllable to come from his mouth were able to progress to foreman because as the crane operator, every word he spoke was paramount to every action on site and Howard listened intently on the other end to the radio set to Pete’s channel- the other two he routinely tuned out. Right now however, he had been having some back and forth with Howard Smith or Smitty as he was known on site to make him easily distinguished from PM Howard over the radio waves. Smitty was overseeing the all important detail of the electrical transfer of the site from diesel generators that had been powering the site to date to the city grid. Months of preparation and mountains of paperwork, meetings, permits and burocercy preceded this milestone- one of many that was the sole responsibility of Howard which he had done many times before.

In the basement, above the sub basement and 20 feet below street level the scene was truly industrial. Yellow work lights illuminated the area where a team of electricians including their foreman, Donna, went about coils of gigantic copper wire coated with layers of plastic so heavy that a bobcat was wheeling about moving them in and out of place. The ground below was dry concrete and sand and everywhere rebar was protruding from the walls and ceiling and floor in ways that looked orderly yet complex. The whole area looked like an M C Escher painting and in the centre was a huge steel box where all the jacketed copper wires led to and entered from the sides, top and bottom. Inside the box was the maze that made up the main panel for a future 57 story building that only Donna, her few top electricians working with her, and Howard knew its inner workings intimately and blindfolded. Smitty was working the bobcat and keeping Howard up to date on the progress.

The street level was completely hidden from the outside with ten foot hording surrounding the entire site and entry was strictly regulated by security guards. Mud and concrete made up the rest with piles of scaffolding sectioned to one area and rebar another, trailer offices for all the subcontractors and the general contractor were next to the scaffolding and piles of conduit for pluming and electrical on the other side of the rebar. Muddy paths wound through the material cashes while deep and ominous pits to lower levels were cordoned off leaving a handful of entrances onto the main floor of the actual building despite its literally open air concept, its levels gaining in number every week.

Throughout the existing floors a precise system was in place that is standard for any concrete tower where scaffolding was dismantled and formwork was removed, cleaned, sorted and placed back in the cache until it was picked up again by the crane to be used on the upper most level. This work was performed mostly by labourers and carpenters and was grueling. On sunny days you were in the shade and on rainy days the wind would blow right through the floor and soak you to the bone and the only thing that kept you going was a strict schedule. At the top floor the motivation was evident as it seemed that nothing could stop the pace of the carpenter crews working against the rain to build their forms that would be poured on Monday morning and stripped on Wednesday. This mentality came from two camps- the more you worked toward a deadline the quicker the days went by- much the same as the formwork strippers worked below- and the foreman themselves get paid per square foot of formwork their crew installs. Motivation indeed. The lead formwork carpenter can bring in $100,000 or more a year with a good crew and good weather and good luck. Greg’s crew were putting together the last few hundred square feet of flooring form down on top of the scaffolding assembled by Mickey, Smitty lead hand, and the remaining labourers whom weren’t below stripping form- or at 3 o’clock on a Friday- pissing about more like.

From the view on the deck at the forming crew like to call it, it was like being out on a fishing boat on the North Sea- the wind was starting to pick up and the sky was showing no sign of clearing- rather it was becoming dark well early for this time of year as the clocks were not to be set back for another month! Rain water was spraying from Levi’s hammer as it swung repeatedly in large arcs at the nails he set in the in form. Nail! One, two, three strikes and it was buried. Another nail set, one, two, three… nail.

Once finishing a length of ten or so four inch nails he stood up and stretched his back as hundreds of hours of bent over nailing and cutting beg necessary occasionally. Overseeing the deck of saturated crewmembers he takes in the scene with content. Only after many years but not before your body becomes too deteriorated or you mind too jaded can you soak up such an experience as this- the crew of determined souls, striving achieve recognition and accolades from their peers, to prove something to themselves, to go home and tell their friends, theirs spouse, their kids of their achievements, to have a story to tell a stranger at a bar. Levi then looks up towards the crane tower and sees the drops of water fall from the grey background, the patches of clouds moving in what seems like a quickened time lapse across the sky and feels the refreshing feel of the rain on his face before he lowers his head.

Without notice Levi, noticing everyone preoccupied around him, grabbed some tools that have been out in the rain for too long and disappears down the scaffolding stairs taking him down the five floors to ground level and some reprieve from the weather.



At 4:20 PM the power in First Canadian Place goes out, as well as the Trump Tower construction site, and from what anyone can tell, all of Bay Street from the corner of Adelaide Street where the Trump Tower construction site is located to King Street at the other end of the block that was Canada’s financial hub including the international banks housed in the city, and the Toronto Stock Exchange.