Maurice Bridge
Sun
VANCOUVER – With references to the Berlin Wall and Vancouver’s rejected waterfront freeway project from the 1960s, opponents of the proposed Whitecaps stadium in Gastown launched their counter-offensive Wednesday.
The Gastown Neighbourhood Coalition, made up of area businesses and residents, held a news conference to outline its objections to plans for a 16,000-seat outdoor soccer stadium on a seven-hectare parcel of railway property.
The stadium would extend north along the waterfront roughly between Richards and Cambie Streets on a platform above the railyard north of Water Street
“Gastown’s revitalization is well under way,” said coalition spokesman Jon Stovell, a longtime Gastown redeveloper. “We see this stadium in its form and its massing and its development on top of a table over the tracks — I call it big-box waterfront — as totally incompatible with . . . Gastown.”
Stovell said the stadium would be twice the height of the largest local buildings, which are capped at 22.8 metres, and would cut off much of Gastown from the rest of the city. “It’s going to form a sort of Berlin Wall, cutting the eastern parts of Gastown off from the city and off from the waterfront.”
Anthony Norfolk of the Gastown historic area planning committee, which advises city hall on the area, said placing the stadium on a platform over the tracks would present neighbouring buildings with a view of concrete pillars or a wall to cover them. “That would be horribly destructive.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
