CITY residents will soon be asked for their vision for what the central waterfront at the foot of Lonsdale should be.
Following a stakeholders' workshop held in July, city staff delivered an update on the long road to finalizing a plan for the waterfront site to council Monday night.
Far from being potential designs to vote on, staff stressed that they were only presenting "notional ideas."
Among the ideas: connections for the Spirit Trail, restaurants and coffee/ice cream shops, a covered market, a winter ice rink, a zip-line connecting the upper floor of one of the buildings with the waterfront, water features, and a series of buildings ranging from about 50,000 square feet to 125,000 square feet that could be used for commercial space, a hotel or classrooms for Capilano University.
Council members were eager to begin making suggestions for priorities and ideas.
"I'm happy to see this going forward," Mayor Darrell Mussatto said. "I think we've got some really good stuff to work on here. . . . (We're) really working to make this a space that's used not just for one season but four seasons and trying to always have something there."
Mussatto also announced one particularly exciting potential amenity for the site.
"I want to go on the record and publicly state I have had discussions with the Vancouver Aquarium who are very interested in having a satellite location here. They could maybe have 10,000 or 15,000 square feet of space where they can actually have an exhibit," he said. "I think something like that could be worked in for the site would be a really huge draw."
With the report, staff recommended that council abandon any plans to stabilize the soil and concrete pilings the old Cates Building sits on, and make the building the new home of the Presentation House Gallery.
Apart from being an extremely difficult and expensive job, relocating the gallery to the existing Cates Building was far from ideal for some on council.
"I do think the idea of trying to create an art gallery within the existing shed - that never quite made sense to me," Coun. Pam Bookham said. "With certain issues around the impact of all that light and water on the photographs in a building that was designed for boats, not art, that was a real challenge for us."
Instead, the gallery will likely be able to find a new location on solid ground within the central waterfront area, staff noted, and it is more feasible to salvage the building and move it, rather than try to keep it on the precarious wet soil it sits on now.
Notes gathered by the city at the stakeholders' meeting have also been released for public consideration.
