The Big Nickel

Most towns put their founder on a plaque. Sudbury put its paycheque on a hill.

Above the city’s west end, standing on edge like a coin about to be spent, is the Big Nickel: nine metres — about thirty feet — of stainless steel, an exact giant copy of a Canadian five-cent piece. It has been watching over Sudbury since 1964, and it is still the first thing anybody asks about when you say you’ve been.

Nine Metres of Five Cents

The Big Nickel is a replica of the 1951 Canadian nickel, right down to the details. King George VI holds one face; the other carries a nickel refinery, ringed by a wreath — the same design Canadians carried in their pockets by the millions.

The 1951 coin was a special one. It was struck to mark two hundred years since the element nickel was first isolated and given its name — and there was nowhere on Earth that owed that element more than Sudbury. The city sits in the Sudbury Basin, one of the richest nickel deposits ever found, and for generations the mines and smelters here quite literally paid for the town.

So when Sudbury scaled a nickel up to the size of a house, it wasn’t showing off. It was keeping the books in public.

The Firefighter Who Wouldn’t Take No

The Big Nickel exists because one man refused to drop an idea. Ted Szilva was a Sudbury firefighter with a big notion for Canada’s upcoming centennial: a giant coin, a mining park, a monument to the people who worked the rock. The idea won a local contest — and then ran into every wall a good idea can run into. Doubters, red tape, empty pockets.

Szilva pushed ahead anyway, largely with his own money and his own stubbornness, working with local signmaker Bruno Cavallo to get the coin built. On July 22, 1964, before a crowd of some 2,500 people, the Big Nickel was unveiled — proof that a roadside giant doesn’t need a corporation or a committee. Sometimes it just needs one person who won’t stop.

The monument cost about $35,000 at the time. Sudbury has been collecting the interest ever since.

A City Written in Rock

To understand the coin, look at the ground it stands on. Sudbury’s landscape is famously bare and dramatic — dark, weathered rock rolling off in every direction, the kind of terrain astronauts once trained on for the Moon. That rock is the reason for everything: the mines, the smelters, the headframes on the horizon, and the wages that built the city around them.

Today the Big Nickel stands at Dynamic Earth, Science North’s earth sciences centre, where the story that started with Szilva’s coin is told properly — down in a real mine tour, seven storeys under the same rock the nickel celebrates.

Anybody can spend a nickel. Sudbury framed one and put it on a hill.

Worth the Drive

Stand under the Big Nickel and look up, and then turn around and look out at the rock. The joke lands first — a coin the size of a building! — but the meaning lands second, and it stays. This is a monument to miners built in the shape of the thing they dug out of the earth, raised by a firefighter who believed a working city deserved a landmark as big as its story.

Sixty years on, it is still the best five cents in Canada.