He has the face of an aging falcon, something of that raptor’s quick, intense, scrutinizing gaze, quite a bit of its ferocious independence and, lately, a great deal of its passion for cloud grazing. You sense, too, that real estate developer Harry Stinson seems almost personally affronted by the law of gravity, by bureaucracy (gravity’s social vector), by people who merely stroll through life as if the journey, not the arrival, actually mattered. Ask him for something—a coffee, perhaps—that isn’t at hand in his tiny, doorless office off the lobby of 1 King West (that ingratiating, city-enhancing sliver of a condominium hotel he conceived and developed). He won’t send an assistant to get it. He’ll go to the coffee bar himself. And he won’t even walk there. He’ll run. It’s a shock, the first time you see him do that. You don’t expect 53-year-old developers of high-end properties to shed their professional gravitas and suddenly morph into a Speedy Gonzalez cartoon, but ask for that coffee and one moment Harry Stinson is right beside you and the next he’s halfway across the marble-drenched, leather-club-chair-festooned lobby. No one seems startled. It is, presumably, a daily occurrence. It doesn’t even seem showy—he more or less speed-walks when he’s taking you on a tour of the building, and every day he runs up the stairs of 1 King West twice (he takes the elevator down). That’s 102 storeys in total, and he does it in 20 minutes.

He has done the same thing at the Sears Tower in Chicago, and at New York City’s Empire State Building and World Trade Center (when it was still there). He is pencil thin. He is usually impatient. “Ask me questions,” he says, within seconds of our having met, all the while nursing a Diet Dr. Pepper and keeping tabs on incoming phone calls. No time for mundane niceties. Not when you’re trying to salvage your vision of what 1 King West might be, not when you’re mano-a-mano with city hall about your plans for a project you’re calling the Sapphire Tower (conceived to be the city’s highest, till council got its dream-killing hands on the plans), not when you’re completing what could be one of the most environmentally responsible condos in the country—High Park Lofts, which will utilize geothermal bore holes for some of its heating and cooling, and feature an indoor garden.

Harry Stinson wants to lead the pack. Harry Stinson speaks obsessively, rants in fact, about his vision for his buildings and his city. Harry Stinson wants to soar. But there are times—when he is in a fit of frustration with project managers and financiers and incompetent workmen and city hall bureaucrats, when he sees his dreams being watered down—when he has to concede that most of his development projects have never come to fruition; there are times when that tiny office begins to feel like a cage, when the falcon metaphor falters, when you wonder if you are dealing with the budgie of 1 King West, there for amusement value for the bankers and financiers, the men with real money; because, after all, he is a very hard-working little budgie indeed.

Harry Stinson was adopted, at the age of eight months, by Jean and Fred Stinson (he does not know who his birth parents are and has no interest in meeting them). They would adopt another child, his sister Martha (now employed by TD Canada Trust), and go on to have three children of their own (Tom, who died of a brain tumour at 13; Elizabeth, who works in the food service industry; and the youngest, Keith, who took over his father’s advertising firm after his death in 2003). They had a house on Lytton Boulevard, off Avenue Road. Jean Stinson lives today in a spacious condo near Wellesley and Bay, and remembers her son as a well-behaved and imaginative boy with a strong sense of propriety. She recounts how, at the age of nine, he told her he had thrown her pack of cigarettes into the garbage. “I only smoked two or three a day anyway,” she says, “but he was right. I never smoked again after that.” She also remembers him telling her, when he reached high school, that “some of the boys in my class are hoods, but I don’t think I want to be one.” Jean Stinson has a strong social conscience, and for the last 10 years has volunteered with the Metropolitan United Church’s Out of the Cold food program. She helps cook and serve meals to the homeless. “That’s what I believe in,” she says, “that sense of duty to your neighbours. My father strongly believed in taxes, in the common good. That was a background I hoped to convey to my children.”