and a half away but reaching lower. Some 1.7 million tourists visit annually. A second observation deck on the 99th floor serves as a backup. In January 2009, a major renovation of the Skydeck began, including the installation of retractable glass balconies which extend approximately from the facade of the 103rd floor, overlooking South Wacker Drive. The all-glass boxes, informally dubbed "The Ledge", allow visitors to see the street below. The boxes, which can accommodate , opened to the public on July 2, 2009. On May 29, 2014, the laminated glass flooring of one of the boxes cracked while visitors were inside, but there were no injuries. The flooring of the same box cracked again on June 12, 2019. In May 2022 a fifth glass ledge opened on the west facade overlooking South Wacker Drive. Height When completed, the Sears Tower was the world's tallest building but not the world's tallest structure. Toronto's CN Tower was about taller, although the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) does not consider the CN Tower to be a building, since it does not have floors from the ground up. The Willis Tower remains the third tallest building in the Americas and in the Western Hemisphere (after One World Trade Center and Central Park Tower in New York City). With a pinnacle height of , it is the third-tallest freestanding structure in the Americas. It is the 16th-tallest freestanding structure in the world by pinnacle height. When the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was completed in 1998, it claimed to be the tallest building in the world, measuring tall including decorative spires. Chicagoans objected to this claim on the basis that the Sears Tower's top floor was higher than that of either of the Petronas Towers. In the ensuing controversy, four categories of "tallest building" were created. Of these, Petronas was the tallest in the category of height to the top of architectural elements, meaning spires but not antennas. Taipei 101 in Taiwan claimed the record in three of the four categories in 2004, surpassing the Petronas Twin Towers in spire height and the Sears Tower in roof height and highest occupied floor. People suggested that Sears add cosmetics atop its tower to surpass Taipei 101, but this did not materialize. On August 12, 2007, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai was reported by its developers to have surpassed the tower