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Woodwards parkade to be redeveloped
City to build new garage with street-level commercial space
John Mackie
Vancouver Sun
Thursday, September 05, 2002
The old Woodwards parking lot on Cordova is soon to be torn down and rebuilt as a 700-car facility with a heritage-look frontage.
The city of Vancouver plans to tear down the Cordova Street half of the Woodwards parking garage and rebuild it, at a cost of $17 million.
The city, which paid $11 million for the Woodwards parkade in 1995, hopes the project will help revitalize the neighbourhood.
When the new Cordova parkade is finished at the end of 2003, the city will embark on a seismic upgrade and facade renovation of the Water Street side of the parkade. The facade changes are estimated to cost an additional $3 million, while the seismic upgrade cost has yet to be determined.
The new Cordova parkade will be six stories high and have 700 parking stalls. It will have a heritage look and will include about 9,000 square metres of commercial space on the main floor and basement.
Project head Clyde Hosein of the city engineering department said the retail component will hopefully help revitalize a moribund commercial zone.
"If you look at Cordova to the west, it's reasonably attractive," Hosein said. "You get to this block, bang, it's gone. This will help recreate animation on the street, and bring a lot of people to the street."
Heritage expert Don Luxton concurs.
"One of the main problems in the area is that because of the monolithic nature of the parkade, its broken the retail connection along Cordova street, which historically was the retail street of Gastown," Luxton said.
The city purchased the parkade when Woodwards closed, to ensure there was ample parking for Gastown. But it wasn't cheap: the city paid more than twice as much for the parkade as Fama Holdings did for the actual Woodwards department store, which cost $5 million in 1995.
Bruce Maitland of the city's real estate branch defended the purchase price.
"If you look at the land value of the parkade with the income it was producing at the time, I think the value was quite reasonable," Maitland said.
"The Woodwards building would come as a negative land value, because you had a 600,000 or 700,000 square foot building which had no use, which would probably be a major demolition project."
Hosein said the parkade made about $1 million profit per year in the late 90s. But the Cordova street side was literally starting to crumble, and the decision was made to raze it and start over. It was closed in mid-August.
Hosein said the city knew that the Cordova parkade, which was built in 1957, needed a lot of repairs when they bought it.
"We knew the Cordova side was dated," Hosein said. "Certainly we had done some due diligence on the structure. We knew we could operate it for a while as it was, but in the future we'd have to do a complete rebuild or knock-down."
He anticipates the city recouping its investment through the new and higher rents paid by commercial tenants.
The major tenant is likely to be Historical Xperience, which hopes to operate a 5,400-square-metre heritage-themed tourist attraction in the basement.
The company, which is partly owned by architect Al Waisman and Petcetera founder Dan Guillaume, operates the wildly successful Tunnels of Moose Jaw heritage attraction in Saskatchewan, which drew 130,000 customers last year in a town of only 35,000 people.
The Water street renovations may include an additional two and a half stories
of parking, and 1,080 square feet of new office space. Parking spaces on Water will increase to 775 from the 580 currently.
The city is also looking at running a heritage streetcar line up Cordova Street, beginning at Granville Island and running to the CPR station at the foot of Granville in Gastown.
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