TORONTO – Toronto Police Const. David Hopkinson has arrested his fair share of rooftoppers, a nickname for the daredevil photographers who climb atop skyscrapers to snap vertigo-inducing pictures of the world below.
He expects it’s just a matter of time before one of them in Canada dies.
“We can’t bat 1,000 on this,” he says. “I believe that eventually somebody is going to make a mistake, and it will be a critical one.”
Last year, at least two deaths were linked to rooftopping.
A 17-year-old man fell off a building in Russia and a 24-year-old New Yorker slipped off the roof of the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. In 2012, a photographer died after he fell into a Chicago building’s smokestack.
But despite the obvious dangers, there’s no shortage of photographers willing to take a big risk for a great photo from the top of a bank building, condo tower or the edge of a construction crane.
It was just a few years ago that rooftopping lingered on the fringes of the mainstream in North America, appealing to urban explorers who were already venturing into abandoned buildings, city sewers and subway systems.
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When padlocks started appearing on fences and entryways to rooftops, that’s when one Montreal-based photographer — who asked for his name to be withheld for legal reasons — knew rooftopping had reached new competitive heights.
Sometimes the locks are placed by rooftoppers themselves, a strategic manoeuvre by some looking to claim their own picturesque turf.
“The rooftopping scene (in Toronto) is really well oiled. It’s groups of two, three or four people, and they battle for the rooftops,” the photographer says.
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