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You\u2019ll lose your breath trying to describe Plaza 88. It wraps an elevated SkyTrain station with seven storeys of parking and two levels of shops and services, has a 10-screen movie theatre, a cavernous bus loop in its belly, and a heritage building tucked at street level.<\/p>\n
On top of this New Westminster fortress sit three condo high-rises, the tallest 36 storeys. A fourth is due this summer on an adjacent block, connected underground and by an overpass, and it\u2019s advertised as western Canada\u2019s tallest rental development.<\/p>\n
While developers continue to erect grand master-planned communities around Metro Vancouver transit stations, there\u2019s still nothing like Plaza 88. For Graham McGarva, who helped design the $250-million project, working on it was an \u201cextreme adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Plaza 88\u2019s shops have been open to the public since 2012. But Vancouverites who never leave the comforts of the city\u2019s beaches, downtown or hipster high streets would gasp if they discovered the complex at the heart of New Westminster.<\/p>\n
Is Plaza 88 an urbanized chunk of suburbia? Or a suburbanized chunk of an old downtown? The condos feel slick like Vancouver\u2019s, yet the scale of the parking feels suburban and the proximity to the train makes the inside feel industrial. What do you call a mad urban recipe like this?<\/p>\n
\u201cTransit village\u201d was a term used by marketers selling the project. One realtor<\/a> said that living at Plaza 88 would be so convenient that residents would have no excuse for returning home without milk.<\/p>\n McGarva, who was a founding principal of the firm that designed the project, calls it a \u201ccollision course\u201d of uses.<\/p>\n McGarva\u2019s over three decades with VIA Architecture (he\u2019s since left the firm) included work on the Millennium and Canada rapid transit lines, so he knows what an outlier Plaza 88 is.<\/p>\n The fact that rapid transit investment brings convenience for residents and a development land rush is common knowledge today. Massive projects built around transit hubs, like Burnaby\u2019s The Amazing Brentwood, brag about the \u201centire region a quick ride away.\u201d<\/p>\n But Plaza 88 was built when the marriage of transit and development wasn\u2019t seen so positively, especially in New Westminster. Would people really want to live so close to a station, especially one with a reputation for drug sales and loitering \u201cundesirables\u201d? Wouldn\u2019t people interested in high density choose Vancouver instead?<\/p>\n Being spit into a mall after getting off the train sounds more like an East Asian city than Vancouver. Here, integrating a development with a public transit station is tricky, McGarva said. Even where all parties agree on the direction, \u201cpublicly funded projects and privately financed development interact like fire and oil on a superheated stove.\u201d<\/p>\n But in 2005, developers Michael and Patti Degelder took the risk.<\/p>\n And with the help of McGarva and VIA Architecture, Plaza 88 showed just how tightly a development could embrace a train station.<\/p>\n Gambling on gambling<\/b><\/p>\n The idea for a mixed-use development at the station had been kicking around since 1996<\/a>. The proposal with shops, offices, condos and a 110,000 square-foot thelas<\/a> casino \u2014 almost 60 percent larger than River Rock Casino including online maxbet<\/a> gambling games \u2014 was approved by the city in 2001.<\/p>\n However, there was a provincial election that year. Gordon Campbell of the BC Liberals was elected premier, and he promised no new casinos would be built in the province (a promise the government later broke).<\/p>\n So the project was rejigged, and in 2005 the new development was announced.<\/p>\n The mayor at the time, Wayne Wright, said he hoped it would bring \u201cgood citizens who will be the eyes on the street\u201d and reduce the drug trade at the station, which police patrolled constantly.<\/p>\n Headlines of the day quipped that the development would put the \u201cnew\u201d in New Westminster.<\/p>\n But the project faced a lot of challenges that had to be overcome one step at a time, with tweaks both during and after construction.<\/p>\n Sales from the first two towers had to help fund the third tower, said McGarva, and a lease to Safeway helped fund the commercial component.<\/p>\n The project also had to push through the 2008 financial crisis and TransLink\u2019s decision to cancel promised transit upgrades in 2009. (The improvements were eventually launched in 2013.)<\/p>\n And developers had to build around the station, which remained open throughout the construction process.<\/p>\n \u201cPlaying with SkyTrain, you can\u2019t just take it out of service for a year and a half,\u201d said McGarva.<\/p>\n Then there was the challenge of knitting all the pieces together.<\/p>\n On a recent Monday tour through Plaza 88\u2019s stairways and walkways, escalators and elevators and art and annexes, McGarva said, \u201cThis is connective tissue pushed to the absolute extreme limits\u2026 Everything was down to the inch. Every square foot is a story.\u201d<\/p>\n You\u2019ll read one of those stories on the ground when you exit the SkyTrain platform. There are two sets of tiles beside one another, one from the original station in 1985 and another from the station upgrade in 2013.<\/p>\n Look up and there\u2019s another \u2014 a canopy over the station held up by skinny, stick-like columns.<\/p>\n The explanation is outside on a wall of Plaza 88: \u201cMaking Canada, a tented canopy set upon a hill.\u201d<\/p>\n McGarva wrote the line. He had the problem of a blank wall facing Eighth Street and decided to include some art, a nod to the way large ads used to be painted on the sides of Victorian buildings. The text refers to more than just the canopy over the station.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the tented canopy,\u201d he said, pointing to the station, \u201cbut it\u2019s also [a reference to] the Royal Engineers who are setting up on this hill to make Canada, the Royal City of New Westminster and Confederation.\u201d New Westminster was once the capital of British Columbia, named by Queen Victoria.<\/p>\n On a different wall of the station is another line of text, intended to be the counterpoint. \u201cI will tell you once, but you must never ask me again.\u201d<\/p>\n It was spoken by Marie Bandura, born Marie Joseph, a member of the Qayqayt First Nation who lived by the Fraser River in New Westminster. Bandura was a residential school survivor who later lived in Vancouver\u2019s Chinatown, pretending to be Chinese. The quote comes from Bandura\u2019s revelation of her true Indigenous heritage to her daughter Rhonda Larrabee. Larrabee later became a Qayqayt chief.<\/p>\n There are also coloured panels, which in Morse code spell \u201cNew Westminster\u201d and \u201cYi Fao,\u201d the Cantonese name for the city, which means \u201cSecond Port.\u201d New Westminster had its own Chinatown.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a layering of responses to the history of the site at the edge of the Golden Mile, the beginning of Chinatown and close to the Qayqayt\u2019s original settlement,\u201d said McGarva. Plaza 88 is on the old edge of the Fraser River.<\/p>\n The art also raises questions about what gets \u201cobliterated\u201d over time, and by what, he added.<\/p>\n \u201cShopping malls don\u2019t normally have public art explorations like this.\u201d<\/p>\n Transit-collided development<\/b><\/p>\n As completion of the final tower brings the project to a close this summer, 14 years after it was first announced, there\u2019s still no Metro Vancouver development as intimate with a station as Plaza 88.<\/p>\n Some come close, such as Marine Gateway in Vancouver, but they\u2019re next door neighbours of transit rather than true cohabitants. You need to follow a walkway to get to where the action is. Developments like this capitalize on the transit access, while the lack of true integration means they\u2019re safer to complete for all parties involved.<\/p>\n On the other hand, disembark at New Westminster and you\u2019re in the heart of Plaza 88: condos above, shops all around and, under the tracks, a playground in the same concourse as overhead trays of cables.<\/p>\n You can get your teeth checked or hair cut, and then move on to novelties that would be at home in all corners of Metro Vancouver: a hot dog stand like the ones on Robson Street, a Korean caf\u00e9 selling bingsoo shaved ice that you\u2019d expect to find in Coquitlam, and an escape room centre that was first made popular in Richmond, where you solve puzzles to break out of themed rooms.<\/p>\n Despite the wild mix and design of the plaza, it doesn\u2019t feel out of place.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s so New West,\u201d said Neal LaMontagne, who teaches urban design at the University of British Columbia and includes Plaza 88 on his class walking tours. \u201cIt\u2019s always been a working city; a little rough around the edges.\u201d<\/p>\n And the drug dealers that so worried the city are gone. \u201cI don\u2019t know where they\u2019ve gone, but they\u2019re not here anymore,\u201d Mayor Wright, perhaps naively, told the Vancouver Sun in 2010.<\/p>\n Though Plaza 88 had a complicated birth, reaching for moving target after moving target, McGarva says the work of city building requires loving and accepting the organic and unexpected results.<\/p>\n \u201cI bill myself as an architect and city builder, and it was the city part that I was always interested in,\u201d he said. \u201cCity building is about a lot of the events you can\u2019t control\u2026 You do your part, someone else does theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n Could something like Plaza 88 be done again?<\/p>\n Strolling through the development and revisiting the edges where the old station has been stitched into a new home, McGarva doesn\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one would voluntarily come this close to a station again.\u201d<\/p>\n **<\/p>\n Christopher Cheung<\/a> is a reporter at The Tyee<\/a>, where this story originally appeared.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"