Vancouver Lookout

In nineteen seventy-seven, public relations specialist Tom Butler was looking for someone who would make Vancouver notice the new Vancouver Lookout. That was what the owners of the complex paid him for: above the offices and department store, they had built a circular hall with views in every direction and a revolving restaurant. The building was then called the Sears Tower; its present name, Harbour Centre, came later. On opening day, it was the city's tallest tower, but the owners felt that one record was not enough.

Butler decided to invite Neil Armstrong—the first person to step onto the Moon. Reaching him proved difficult. Butler called Houston, Washington, D.C., and New York until he finally got Armstrong's home number in Ohio. By then, the former astronaut had left NASA and was teaching aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He tried to live as a working professor rather than endlessly repeat before the public the story of a few hours on the Moon. For the tower's owners, it was precisely his rare agreement to come that turned the opening of a commercial attraction into an event.

Armstrong agreed, but on the way from the airport he admitted to Butler that he was worried about the upcoming speech: it was his first visit to Canada, and he knew little about the country. Butler had to provide the invited celebrity with a local story. In Stanley Park, he showed Armstrong the monument to Warren G. Harding, the first sitting president of the United States to visit Canada. Harding, too, was born in Ohio and spoke in Vancouver about the two countries being neighbors. Armstrong had a connection on which he could build his speech.

The ceremony was set for ten oh one in the morning on August thirteenth—eight years, twenty-two days, fourteen hours, and five minutes after Armstrong's first step on the Moon. Together with Mayor Jack Volrich and the owners of the complex, Armstrong opened the restaurant and the lookout, then left a boot print in fresh cement. For many years, this mark was shown upstairs as part of the tower's history.

Later, the lookout was rebuilt, and the concrete imprint disappeared. It is no longer on the present circular floor. What remains is the calculation made by Butler and the owners: visitors rise from the street in exterior glass elevators to the place where Vancouver first sold a view of the entire city under the name of a person whose most famous footprint was much farther away from here.