The CN Tower Could Be Torn Down Because it’s Not Valuable Enough

The CN Tower could come down long before its 200-year expiry date.

An engineer who worked for the company that designed the Toronto-defining structure said that the CN Tower could be torn down and replaced with something even taller thanks to the city’s sky-high real estate prices.

The iconic building “could rival the pyramids of Egypt for longevity, but in today’s reality, it will be demolished when it is more profitable to replace it,” wrote Patrick Quinn in the Toronto Star.“ With land prices escalating in Toronto at warp speed, that will be sooner than we might think.”

Quinn is the co-founder of structural engineering firm Quinn Dressel, and headed up structural engineering at Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden – the architectural firm that co-designed the CN Tower in the late 1960s.

While the Toronto landmark generates a great amount of money, Quinn says that the real estate on which it sits could generate even more.

He says that a 150-storey skyscraper like Dubai’s Burj Khalifa could one day replace the tower.

In the meantime, the CN Tower continues to pull in some serious dollars. According to its owner, Canada Lands Company Ltd. (CLCL), it generated $72 million in revenue in 2014-2015, a figure that’s up by $6.6 million from a year earlier.

According to Huffington Post, the current plan of attack is to position and market the Tower as a major entertainment complex that functions as a “vertical theme park” and offers a premium adventure experience at every level.

For three decades the CN Tower held the title of world’s tallest freestanding structure, and it has been named one of the seven engineering wonders of the modern world.

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