A terrifying tour of Auckland’s Sky Tower

This story is from the team at thespinoff.co.nz.

Beyond The Sugar Club and the revolving restaurant lies a hidden world that the public cannot explore. let’s go there

“You’ll be fine,” says Bruce Stewart. Let’s take a look through this door.

sky cityThe senior facilities supervisor (a generic title given to him, he says, so “they can park me wherever they want”) stands near the top of the claustrophobic staircase inside Auckland’s Sky Tower and doesn’t bother him at all. absolute.

He’s already taken me up a rattling service elevator for more than 50 flights, then took me on a tour of some of the building’s more unusual spaces, showing me service areas, switchboards, and sprinkler pipes, including surprisingly old computer terminals and frames. internal structures that look like Ghostbusters. gloop is growing on them.

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Bored with it, Stewart decides it’s time to show me something special. Via the internal staircase of the Sky Tower we have risen above The Sugar Club, the Orbit 360 revolving restaurant, the Sky Walk and the public observation deck, and into an area off limits to the general public, only visited by those in the knowing

Stewart is one of those. Using an intercom by the door, he calls security, warns them of what we’re about to do, then opens a door that leads somewhere no one normally gets to go when they buy an all-access pass to the tallest building in Auckland.

Yeah, almost 60 stories up, on a cold, windy, wet weekday, we’re going out.

An icy breeze hits me in the face as I try to look past Stewart and take in the uninterrupted views of Tāmaki Makaurau available on the other side of that door. They are spectacular, better than from the top of Mount Eden on a sunny day, and surely the best place to enjoy the wonder of Aotearoa’s largest city.

It’s also a great place to reflect on your own mortality. After taking a look at the view, I realize something else.

On this particular open-air level there are no barriers, no railings, no fences. If you’re not careful when you walk out that door, there’s nothing stopping you from falling to the ground and hitting the asphalt.

“If you make a mistake, it’s over and it’s over,” warns Stewart. “You don’t bounce.”

That’s when I started sweating. Stewart, a man who always seems to be in a hurry, tries to push me through the door and out onto the observation deck to help me get over my phobia. “There is nothing unsafe,” he says. But my legs are frozen and my bleached knuckles won’t let go of the stair railing. I can not move.

“Nah…nah,” I stutter. “I don’t like…I’m not good with heights.” Stewart mutters, “I can see that.” His disappointment is evident. Here, in front of an open door near the 60th floor of the Sky Tower, this journalist found his breaking point.

Stewart does this all the time. A mountain goat in his previous life probably climbs the Sky Tower most days of his work week and sometimes on weekends. When Covid restrictions close the Sky TowerAfter going down the tourist attractions, he would sometimes come to the city to continue his ascent anyway.

he has his Skyscraper walk up to a work of art – just 21 minutes is all it takes to climb 50 levels and then back down again. “Depends on how I feel,” he brags, “[but] I do not stop. If he has time, sometimes he does it twice, just like that. He is, for the record, a 68-year-old chipper.

Today, Stewart is supposed to show off some of the more unusual areas of the Sky Tower, tell me stories, and reminisce about the days it was built. He may have heard: The Sky Tower turns 25 this week, and Stewart was there from the beginning, working as a shift electrician for Sky City in the mid-1990s, later moving on to maintain the entire complex.

He watched as the Sky Tower was built. “Coming to work in the car, you would look up and see things happening. I was growing up.” Despite being past retirement age, Stewart doesn’t want to leave. “It’s vibrant. Change. He has a lot of things that you don’t expect to happen,” he says. “You are not afraid [going into] to work.”

Today, if something goes wrong at the resort, Stewart is the man people ask to fix it. The other day, he returned from a long weekend to find water gushing out of the casino’s gaming machines first thing in the morning. “It was coming out of the sprinkler system,” he says. “It was all man to action stations, you just have to deal with it.”

Throughout our two-hour drive, he shows me elevator halls, fire levels, electrical cables, toilet pipes, kitchens, stanchions, and access ways, all out of sight of the general public. In Orbit 360, it shows me the dial that increases the rotation speed of the restaurant. Somehow I manage to resist the crank when it’s not looking.

He also tells me stories, because he has collected some over the years. One involves being invited to try an earlier version of Sky Walk, the activity in which daredevils don a harness and walk around Sky Tower’s Saturn-like rings. While there, he noticed that everyone had a perfect view inside The Sugar Club bathrooms. “There was a mad rush to put up a door to keep people from looking in,” he laughs.

Now, he’s trying to get me to go out with him. But, facing the door that he is holding open with his foot, all I can emit is a nervous laugh and a shy squeak. Stewart’s response? “I’m not going to push you out. I’m not going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

Finally, I force my feet to move, and slowly bring one in front of the other. Once I’m outside, my mind clears and I can focus on the stunning views. “Don’t you hear the buzz of the city [up here]Stewart says. He’s right, he’s so incredibly peaceful, blissful even.

Then he messes it up. “It’s a long damn way down.” He seems determined to torture me. And we haven’t gotten to the worst part yet.

“I want to go higher,” shouts a little boy. We have entered the highest public viewing space, the level with those glass panels in the floor that offer a stomach-churning view straight down to the pavement below. That little boy dances on them and then puts his full body weight on the angled panels. Clearly, this kid doesn’t care about safety.

“I want to go even higher!” she screams again, reaching a fever pitch. His mother takes him to a map of the Sky Tower and points out where we are: on the observation deck, the highest point the public is allowed to go to. “There is no higher place,” exhales his mother.

But there is. Stewart gives me a knowing look and invites me to follow him. He opens yet another door to another narrower staircase and leads me up. “I’m huffing and puffing like a billy-o when I get here,” Stewart says of his daily climb.

He stops. At this altitude, with winds averaging a minimum of 50 km/hour, it is easy to feel the tower swaying in the wind. Once again, my knuckles grip the railing. My feet freeze to the ground. Above us is a hatch with a metal wheel attached to it, like something out of Battlestar Galactica. Where are you going? Up inside the spire of the Sky Tower, then if you keep going up, to an outside staircase. The top of the top.

Stewart takes this as a cue to launch into another story. In 1998, when the Sky Tower turned one year old, it was decorated to light up to look like a single candle. A huge canvas flag had been tied to the spire to promote the anniversary. But “it was a very windy night,” he says. One of the ties had come undone. “This thing got loose.”

At 10pm that night, Stewart and another member of staff decided to venture as high as possible to climb Auckland’s Sky Tower in an attempt to re-secure it.

It worked, but Stewart never told his wife about his late-night affair. “It was very windy,” he says, looking a little flustered for the first time in our interview. “It was [worried]but I was 25 years younger”.

Then Stewart looks at me, a twinkle in his eyes, his confidence returned. He wants to know if I’d like to join him in recreating those daring feats from all those years ago. Do I want to climb the Sky Tower needle? “It’s one of the harshest environments out there,” he says. “I could organize it.”

I shake my head. “I’m fine,” I reply. I am ready to return to the safety of the mainland.