By James Stone

It is by far the tallest thing in Canada, if not the whole of North America. The CN tower was the first thing I was pretty excited about seeing when I got to Toronto.

Online or on tourist photographs, it usually looks shiny, luminous and slightly space age, despite having been built in the 1970s. But, as I came out of the airport on a coach that summer evening and looked at it 'in the flesh' for the first time, the CN struck me as being extremely spiky and uncompromising. Crawling in from the airport, we were well off the outskirts of the city, so you couldn't see any skyscrapers in downtown Toronto at all: just this brutal spike creeping into the night sky like a Scythian weapon.

It was as if someone in the 1970s had basically said "Right. We are going to put paid to all those fancy skyscrapers south of the border. The yanks can deal with this." And they stuck up this disturbing shard, without so much as a gaggle of good-natured downtown skyscrapers around it to soften the blow. Of course the good natured downtown skyscrapers are in fact there, but the CN blows them out of the water. Leering high into the sky with only the odd light flashing off the side and a great globule of 'viewing platform' bulging near the top, it looked that night as if it might administer a lethal injection to Mars.

Staying where I was in a hall in the University of Toronto (a bargain at ten Canadian dollars a night), I still found the CN Tower pretty mesmerising. From there it wasn't so sinister – I guess because, from this distance and in the daylight, the downtown skyline was in evidence. So I walked down it. It was a long trek. It took me a couple of hours. I made my way down Spadina Avenue, where at this time of year in the middle of the summer there was a foul stench in the air since most of the restaurants – particularly in the Chinese district – leave their garbage out on the street. I also had to cross some intense motorways that run north of the waterfront before getting to the edge of Lake Ontario. There the foot of the CN rests.

I walked right up it. Virtually pressed my nose up against it. The Canadian icon, I discovered, was made of this dull grey-sand coloured cement. I put my hand against the part of the base I had reached and looked up. A bit over-reverential as a gesture, I know; but I am a sucker for tall North American buildings. The cement was warm, as it was a hot day. And the view: a huge grey curtain blocked out everything from the left to the right before leaning dizzyingly upward. The sight of all that never-ending cement seemed reminiscent of architecture in East Berlin before the wall fell.

I went up it. The lift is great fun, it flies up the side of the building in a sort of elongated alcove at high speed. Now, at the top, I could see, in all their glory, Toronto's multitudinous fleet of downtown skyscrapers. I hadn't been wrong though: the CN is on a completely different scale. From here, the buildings below seem like toy sky scrapers. You could pick them up, toss one in the air and have a juggle. Standing there and looking down, I had to admit: whether it is brutish or elegant, the CN tower is definitely a city centre-piece and skyline shaper par excellence.