Merchants opposed to the soccer stadium proposal urge a master plan for the area
William Boei
Sun
Illustration of a possible development scenario for the railway and port lands between Waterfront Station and Main Street north of Gastown.
VANCOUVER – The Vancouver waterfront between Granville and Main streets should be developed according to a master plan, not with one-off developments like the elevated stadium proposed by the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer club, Gastown merchants said Wednesday.
But the club is sticking to its guns, saying the city should let it build the stadium and worry about developing the rest of the waterfront later.
The Gastown Business Improvement Society put forward several scenarios, the most ambitious of which shows Granville, Cambie and Carrall streets extended to the harbour. They now end either at Cordova Street or at the CP Rail tracks north of Gastown.
It would see dozens of new buildings, including several highrises, built on CP’s railway land south of Waterfront Road, and on Vancouver Port Authority land from the road to the shoreline.
The Main Street overpass could be removed and a pier with a fish market, perhaps along the lines of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, extended into the harbour, urban planner Lance Berelowitz suggested.
Berelowitz and architect Jennifer Marshall were hired by the Gastown business group to sketch out development possibilities.
Only one of their three scenarios includes a soccer stadium, and it would be at ground level east of Waterfront Station and a new transit hub.
Portside Park would remain as it is or be expanded, but would become more accessible.
However, the railway tracks are expected to stay put for several decades or longer, and another development scenario would see a platform built over the tracks and buildings put on top and to the north of the platform.
Berelowitz said the scenarios were not meant as concrete proposals, but to illustrate that the area — Vancouver’s last stretch of developable downtown waterfront — has potential for major coordinated development on the scale of the north False Creek and Coal Harbour neighbourhoods.
“We’re encouraging city council to really take a second to think about that, [and] do the appropriate planning for the whole area as they’ve done in other areas,” he said.
“We’re really offering it as a set of, we hope, intelligent questions around what we might see in this area, and whether or not the stadium fits into that bigger planning picture.”
Gastown Business Improvement Society President Paul Ardagh said the waterfront land can become “a destination . . . to accommodate a variety of interests — tourism, retail, business, transit and entertainment — in one location.”
But Vancouver Whitecaps Director of Operations Bob Lenarduzzi said the club is focused on just one goal: getting its stadium built.
The soccer club bought the whole stretch of railway land from Waterfront to Main Street because CP wouldn’t break it up into parcels, but “we have no plans for that right now,” Lenarduzzi said. “The single purpose that the land was purchased for was to build a stadium.”
He said the club is expecting the tracks to stay in place, and has not considered larger development schemes. The sale includes an easement giving CP the right to keep using the land.
The Whitecaps are dealing with city hall concerns, including making the stadium proposal fit better with historic Gastown, providing an adequate street network, addressing dangerous-goods movement by rail under the stadium and its impact on the port lands to the north.
“We feel that those issues can be overcome and we move forward,” Lenarduzzi said. “We’re confident that on June 27 council will vote to send the process to the next stage.”
He wouldn’t commit to the club’s earlier goal of building the stadium by early 2009, but said it is asking the city “to prioritize the time line . . . and make it a project that they’re prepared to pull out from the rest of the development of the waterfront.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
