Surveyor Colophon, Address and Search-Ad Notice

Callum MacQuarrie, fifty-six, retired high-rise structural surveyor and wind-load technician. I live on Wellington Street West in downtown Toronto. For nineteen years I logged tower sway, pendulum-damper travel, elevator-cable acoustics, and visibility across the Toronto Islands. This monograph is what remains of that notebook, rewritten so a visitor can use it.

I am not on staff at the tower. I never was. My working life was other people’s cores, dampers, and lift contracts, with this hexagonal shaft as the object I could see from my own windows. When I retired I kept the habit of looking south and scoring the cloud. The sponsored-search experiment is how strangers found the notes. It is disclosed on every folio sheet because I would rather be blunt than look like a hidden shop.

Write to the inbox if a number is wrong in a way that matters, or if a lift speed has been formally re-rated. Do not write to ask me to hold a table at 351 metres or to argue with a weather cancellation. I cannot. Letters about the slip-form history, the hexagonal geometry, or the damper’s long-period motion are the letters I actually answer, slowly, with a pencil. Postal mail to the Wellington Street studio is fine. It is a working address in a brick building, not a visitor centre.

Search-advertising transparency, said once in my own voice: I spend a modest amount so that queries about the 553-metre tower can land on cloud-ceiling notes, lift speeds, and revolving-floor mechanics. Anyone who wants an official visit or a dining room should go to the operator, not to a retired surveyor with blueprint paper on a screen. I am grateful when a reader uses the dossier and then looks up at the shaft with a better question than “is it tall.” It is tall. The interesting part is how it was poured, how it moves, and when the lake hides it. The drawings were always in graphite. The tower is still a hexagon with six cars in the corners.