Can you tell me why the Ernst & Young Tower of the TD Centre has a floor named 7A?
Dear Urban Decoder: Can you tell me why the Ernst & Young Tower of the TD Centre has a floor named 7A? I always feel as if I’m in Being John Malkovich when the elevator doors open at that floor.—Peter McNeill, St. Lawrence Market area
In Malkovich, much of the action takes place on Floor 71/2 of a mysterious Manhattan filing company, an office with five-foot ceilings and a magical portal into John Malkovich’s brain. Floor 7A in the Ernst & Young Tower is also a partial floor, though it’s divided horizontally rather than vertically, and you don’t need to pry open the elevator doors with a crowbar to gain access. It’s actually a small, loftlike suite of offices encircling the upper half of TD Securities’ seventh-level trading floor—a huge open space that takes up two storeys. Staff say any similarity to the film is purely coincidental—TD simply wanted to highlight the trading floor’s double height. And besides, the whole notion of a magical portal into someone else’s brain raises all sorts of insider trading issues.
