Val Levitan is peering out the window of a helicopter circling above Toronto's financial district.
The Toronto-based entrepreneur has spent a lot of time on the ground-level construction site of Trump International Hotel & Tower, but this is the first time he has surveyed the rising spire from the sky.
As chief executive officer of Talon International Development Inc., Mr. Levitan is teaming with the Trump organization to fit a five-star hotel, luxury condominiums and multilevel garage onto the site of a former Woolworths store.
His guide on this trip is Mark Garland, a seemingly unflappable engineer who is making plain the challenge of erecting a slender 60-storey tower on a patch of land at Bay and Adelaide.
“It's unheard of in North America,” Mr. Levitan says in comparing the density of the building to its lot size. “Logistically it's a nightmare to deal with.”
Trump Tower, street level rendering.
From the helicopter, it's easier to see how the parts fit into this puzzle: Looming over the construction site is Scotia Plaza, the 60-storey head office of Bank of Nova Scotia.
No small part of Mr. Levitan's task has been placating the bankers next door.
“The building is worth probably a billion dollars and we're going to be swinging a crane around,” he says. “I understand them. They have prime real estate. They don't want it compromised.”
With each swivel of the crane, there is 45 centimetres of clearance between the tip of the boom and the historic National Club on one side and the Bay-Adelaide Centre on the other, says Mr. Garland, the project director for construction management firm Lewis Builds Corp.
“This is the most complicated building structure I've ever worked on,” he says.
Now, two years into construction on the 15,000-square-foot site, the hotel lobby and seven floors of corkscrew parking garage are complete. Work has begun on the first floor of the luxury hotel, which will rise 22 stories. Above that, 27 floors of residential units and a titanium-clad onion dome will take the building to its full height of 281 metres by the time it is finished in 2011.
Getting the building to completion has been a Sisyphean task.
The flamboyant U.S. real estate mogul Donald Trump unveiled his plans for a Trump Tower in Toronto in the spring of 2001 with a 70-storey building designed by Zeidler Partnership Architects.
But the Trump organization's development partner was revealed to be a convicted embezzler and things pretty much fell apart after that.
Talon's chairman, Alex Shnaider, is a Russian-born magnate who lives in Toronto and has built a fortune trading in steel. Talon struck a deal with Trump in 2004 and the principals set about to revive the project.
While the Zeidler design remained largely intact, many other aspects changed.
Trump Tower, Toronto. artist's rendering.
Ten stories were lopped off the building and suites were redesigned.
From the start, Mr. Levitan envisioned a three-storey penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows, 51/2 metres of clear glass and a 360-degree view of the city.
“It's never been done before. This will set our building apart.”
Not everyone in self-effacing Toronto so easily feels an affinity for the vision of Donald Trump and the project has been controversial all along, Mr. Levitan acknowledges.
But the developer, who was born in Minsk and travels the world, says Toronto stands out for its lack of opulent hotels that know how to cosset the business traveller.
He's not worried that Four Seasons, Shangri-La, Ritz-Carlton and the Hazelton are all aiming to create that ethereal atmosphere in the city.
All told, Toronto will have about 1,000 luxury rooms, he points out, which is relatively few for a financial capital of Toronto's size.
“The city needs something like this.”
