Spring is here, and with it, a plethora of new buildings are starting to sprout out of the ground at Vancouver’s $1.5 billion Waterfront Development Project.
The first two tenants, Wild Fin Restaurant and Twigs Bistro and Mini Bar, are set to open in the summer. And while the exact dates aren’t pinned down yet, Twigs has announced it anticipates opening this August. Several other buildings are also rising up under construction cranes at Block 9, Block 12, Block 8 and Block 6 – which will add retail, offices, residential units and other amenities – and even more development is planned this fall.
“We’re very excited how the Waterfront Projects are progressing, and are looking forward to the first tenants moving in later this summer,” said Jason Nortz, Development Review Division manager for the city of Vancouver.
The Port of Vancouver’s work on Terminal 1, where the old Red Lion at the Quay used to be, is also progressing. Warehouse 23, which opened last year at the site, has become a popular new restaurant for the city, and work on the Renaissance Trail is coming along. Most of the rest of the work on the site, however, is waiting for ground stabilization efforts and the destruction of a few old structures, said Abbi Russell, communications manager for the port.
“Waterfront Vancouver is really cooking along right now,” Russell said. “At Terminal 1, we’re doing a lot of baseline work that has to be done before construction. We found an issue with soils and ground stabilization, which pretty much all of us close to the waterfront have to deal with.”
The port is looking at a couple of options to stabilize the ground and prevent liquefaction – which is when the shaking of an earthquake transforms loose soils into behaving like a liquid, essentially sucking buildings down into the ground. The two main options to fight it are adding stone columns for support or something called deep soil mixing – which is a process of adding concrete to loose soil.
The port hopes to have a contractor in place by summer to start that work, after which it will begin planning on a new public market and eventually a replacement for its dock. In the meantime, the port is repairing the dock to extend its lifetime.
“They’ll make some repairs and do some shoring up,” Russell said. “It is scheduled to be replaced eventually as part of the overall project.”
The port is also about to demolish the Columbia Shores building behind the Amphitheater as part of the project.
“We’ll probably be taking that down the first week of April,” Russell said. “It’s in the footprint of the new hotel and will clear the way.”
As for the city’s developments, also under construction now – along with the retail and restaurant buildings on Blocks 9 and 12 – are a seven-story mixed-use building at Block 8, which will include 205 residential units and 23,000 square feet of ground floor retail, and two buildings on Block 6, which include a seven-story retail and office building and a six story apartment building with ground floor retail.
Construction on Block 4, for the eight-story, 138-room Hotel Indigo building and 11-story 40-unit residential building, is waiting on building permits, and construction on the 160-room AC Hotel is waiting on formal land use and building permits, Nortz said.
“Grant Street Pier and Waterfront Park – they are on schedule,” Nortz said. “The pier will be completed before the end of summer 2018, with the park scheduled for completion in the fall of 2018.”
The entire project is expected to take a few decades to finish, but with the first few buildings getting close to opening, this is a very exhilarating time for the development, Russell said.
“We’ve received some important funding, and we’re laying the groundwork for what’s going to happen there in the next 10 to 20 years,” Russell said. “It’s a really exciting time.”
