The Globe and Mail

Six days a week for the past two years, Ted Ollmann, 62, a crane operator with a titanium knee, has begun his 4:30 a.m. climb up a yellow Liebherr hammerhead crane at the Royal Ontario Museum construction site. Once in the cab, 20 storeys above Toronto's Bloor Street, Ollmann lifts steel beams and panels, swings them into place and lowers them to waiting workmen. He's become a nameless hero to admirers in the Park Hyatt roof bar over the way. "We've seen him go up in the winter," says bartender Cordell Barker. "It's gotta be brutal." But there are compensations — such as Ollmann's view of the sun rising over his strenuously striving city, now in the midst of an unprecedented cultural building boom. Until it was blocked by new buildings, he had a long view of the Ontario College of Art and Design's Dalmatian-spotted addition on stilts (he helped build that one) and of the Art Gallery of Ontario, its old face recently torn off to make way for architect Frank Gehry's billowing new design. To his right, he has a perfect bird's-eye view of the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art's messy renovation, and to his left, the even bigger mess — open wound, really — of the Royal Conservatory of Music's reconstruction site.