I have spent decades cataloguing our surroundings, yet even with nearly fifty thousand images sitting on my Flickr account, I can never quite capture enough to satisfy my retrospective curiosity.
Today, while haphazardly clicking through the photo library, I stumbled across a single frame taken exactly twenty-one years ago today: June 27, 2005. The shot looks out from under the concrete belly of the SkyTrain tracks at the McInnis overpass, right here in New Westminster.
Looking at it now, my only real regret is that 360-degree cameras weren't tucked into our pockets back then. However, this static frame still manages to capture some solid urban geometry. The concrete guideway perfectly frames the mid-2000s quay skyline, complete with a SkyTrain caught mid-transit.
The downtown corridor was a very different beast two decades ago; there was certainly nothing that resembles the current New Westminster SkyTrain station in that era. In fact, if I were standing in this exact spot today, rising right behind me would be the massive residential towers of Azure I and Azure II, completed in 2008 and 2009 respectively. The modern station practically tunnels through them. Back then, the area was rougher around the edges, heavily industrial, and completely devoid of the towering glass condominiums that dominate our waterfront today. This single image serves as a gritty reminder of the city we knew before the modern development boom swept the old skyline away.
Still, looking back at these snapshots makes me realize just how nice it is to be home. We have just returned from a month visiting Morocco, making the familiar concrete and glass of our own neighbourhood feel especially grounding. While I immensely appreciate that our retirement allows us to travel to warmer latitudes during the winter months, New Westminster has proven to be a thoroughly interesting and dynamic location to call home since 1996.
