Stepping through Westminster Pier Park this morning from the far edge of downtown, it’s almost comical to recall what greeted us when we moved to New Westminster in 1996. Back then, civic planning apparently meant paving over old industrial wreckage and declaring it "waterfront parking." People bravely parked cars atop vast stretches of black asphalt perched precariously over rotting creosote pilings, inhaled the faint bouquet of decades-old hydrocarbons, and tried not to think about the murky depths of the Fraser below. Large sections were fenced off completely and left to decay.
A century earlier, the real estate wasn't quiet parking but rather a sensory assault of Victorian capitalism. Commercial canning along the river took off in the 1870s after Alexander Ewen and his syndicate proved British consumers would eagerly devour Fraser River sockeye shipped halfway across the globe in one-pound tins. By 1876, Ewen built directly on the New West waterfront, and by the 1890s the pier footprint was packed with four separate canneries operating cheek-by-jowl with feed mills and creameries. Thousands of tons of salmon, predominantly prized sockeye, alongside chinook, coho, and chum, were steam-cooked in iron retorts, sealed, and stamped for export. Machine shops blithely swept oily metal shavings straight through floor-holes into the river.
The Great Fire of 1898 leveled the cannery district, eventually making way for Pacific Coast Terminals and decades of heavy shipping before the whole mess surrendered to neglect and asphalt. Today, post-remediation, the contrast is night and day: native grasses, timber boardwalks, and festival lawns where cannery entrails and commuter sedans used to roast in the sun. It took New West about 130 years to figure out that the riverfront is far better suited for humans with ice cream than tin cans and rusty mufflers, but we got there eventually.