Nothing epitomizes space age urbanism quite like the revolving restaurant.<\/p>\n
Imagine sitting at the top of\u00a0a modern skyscraper, the lights of the city twinkling below,\u00a0enjoying a\u00a0rib eye steak\u00a0or prawn cocktail served in a wine glass.\u00a0In the background, there’s light piano music and the faint clink of cutlery over\u00a0hushed conversation. Out the window, a\u00a0civilized world of traffic-free highways, supersonic air travel, and missions\u00a0to the moon drifts gently by.<\/p>\n
For a brief time in\u00a0the late 1970s, Toronto had three revolving restaurants, making it particularly well endowed with futuristic dining options. Today, just one remains, and the concept is firmly out of fashion.<\/p>\n
The earliest\u00a0concept for\u00a0an elevated, moving dining room\u00a0can be traced to an unbuilt design\u00a0prepared for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. That year, industrial designer\u00a0Norman Bel Geddes proposed a restaurant shaped like a dumbbell turned on its side. Cars would\u00a0park in the base and the restaurant would be perched atop a giant elevator column.\u00a0Had it been built, guests\u00a0would have enjoyed panoramic views of the exhibition grounds from the spiral-shaped upper levels.<\/p>\n
The first realized revolving restaurant opened a little over\u00a025 years later in Dortmund, Germany. The 209-metre Florianturm, which opened to the public\u00a0in 1959, was primarily a communications mast, but shrewd designers included several public features in an effort to spin the concrete column as a tourist attraction, much like Canadian National did with the CN Tower.<\/p>\n
The idea quickly spread to other cities. A tower inside the Ala Moana mall in\u00a0Honolulu, Hawaii sprouted in 1961 and the famous “Eye of the Needle” atop the Space Needle in Seattle opened for\u00a0the\u00a01964 World’s Fair. It was this restaurant that captured the public imagination, at least in the U.S.. Elvis dined there in “It Happened at the World’s Fair,” and queues were routinely hours long.<\/p>\n