CHAMPAIGN – Operating a tower crane isn't for everyone – especially if you're acrophobic, claustrophobic or clumsy. Your whole day is spent in a compact "cabin" about 200 feet in the air. Part of the ...

There’s only a couple of workers among the several dozen on the 2200 Westlake construction site, near Westlake Avenue and Denny Way, who can get away with not wearing a hard hat. One of them is Willie ...

Raymond "Paul" Lacrouts' workday begins with a cup of coffee from 7-Eleven and a brief chat with co-workers. The Lehigh Acres resident then grabs his lunchbox and heads up to his office. Way up. As a ...

Chris Stephen doesn't have a job out of this world but it's way up there. "I've been running tower cranes on and off since 2007," he told me in his "office" three hundred feet in the air. Chris is one ...

This afternoon, Mayor Rahm Emanuel met with Alderman Brendan Reilly and representatives of the developer Related Midwest to kick off the vertical construction of the new One Bennett Park high-rise ...

Look at any metropolitan skyline and you’ll see tower cranes. Such cranes run anywhere from 86 to 262 feet in height; when attached to a building, they can be more than 400 feet in height. Operators ...

Welp. I know what job I can never do. And that’s be a tower crane operator. To even start operating a crane, the guy has to make the scariest climb up the entire thing while carefully switching ...

Mike Freeman’s office is a snap to find, but the commute is a nightmare. He’s a tower crane operator on the Trump Tower site, one of the highest-profile construction projects in the country right now.

When Fourth of July weekend hits, it means that it’s officially summertime in Chicago. And summer is also the season when developers and construction crews are working as quickly as possible to erect ...

The man who was operating the massive tower construction crane at the time of its deadly collapse in downtown Bellevue Thursday night has a long criminal record, including at least six drug ...

The Bellevue crane found to have a 2-foot-long hairline crack was repaired and certified for operation Wednesday at The Bravern construction site. The welding repairs were completed late Tuesday on ...

AUSTIN, Texas — Kit Lundin is used to being high in the air. He's been operating tower cranes for around 40 years. But the crane collision Wednesday morning at a construction site in the Mueller area ...