THE END IS NIGH FOR THE Terminal City
East Vancouver industrial complex is over a century old, and is a popular film site
In the eco-conscious, uberclean Vancouver of today, the Terminal City Iron Works is a throwback to another era. An industrial one. The block-long site at Victoria and Franklin in east Vancouver started off as a foundry that produced most of Vancouver’s fire hydrants and manhole covers. In recent years, it’s been one of Vancouver’s busiest film sites, with about 700 shoots since 1999.
“The first stuff we (got) involved with was the X-Files and its offshoot The Lone Gunmen,” said Patrick Doiron of Industrial Works Ltd., who has been operating the film site.
“We had the TV series Dark Angel here and movies like Superman and Catwoman. A little bit of everything.”
The latest movie to shoot at Terminal City was the new Ryan Reynolds film, Deadpool. It’ll also be the last, because the site has been sold and will be redeveloped.
The purchase hasn’t been registered yet, but the 100,856-sq.ft site was for sale for $14.9 million. It’s zoned industrial, and will remain so.
“We haven’t landed on the development concept yet,” said Ben Taddei of the Conwest Group, which bought the site.
“It could be one large building, it could be a subdivision of industrial lots and the construction of a couple of buildings, or more. We’re just going through that analysis right now. We hope to be under construction in about 12 months.”
It’ll take a year because the site is heavily contaminated from its nine decades as a foundry and will have to be remediated. The northeast corner used to be a ravine, but was filled in with sand that was contaminated during the production process.
“A lot of foundries back in the day built on or near a ravine, or a big hole or ditch,” explains Doiron. “They would take the spent sand they used in the moulding process and would just dump it in the hole afterwards. Over enough time you acquired new land.
“So we’re very blessed to have about 10,000 cubic metres of spent sand that we now have to reclaim. Most of the structures we see are built on top of this unfortunate (byproduct), silica sand mixed with iron.”
There are a lot of structures on the site. Terminal City started off as one building in the middle of the block, and over time expanded over 16 lots between Victoria and Semlin Drives and Franklin and Pandora Streets.
There are a couple of massive industrial buildings with open interiors that soar four storeys high, but most of the site is small structures that have been cobbled together.
“It (was) literally like, ‘Hey we’ve got a new project, we need a new space,’ ” said Doiron.
“Let’s build a little lean-to here.
And then the lean-to sits there for 30 years and they add to the lean-to.”
As a result, the inside of the complex is a movie producer’s dream, a hodgepodge of industrial buildings that can double for most anything, anywhere.
“This building in the south I think was part of Mexico for A-Team,” said Doiron. “It’s been every country you could think of, to Seattle, to post-apocalyptic Vancouver, you name it.”
Terminal City has been used so much as a film lot, it’s hard to tell the real industrial buildings from the faux versions built for films and TV series.
A good example is a ramshackle brick building near the northwest corner that looks a century old, but is really a facade.
“There were 15 or 20 two- and three-storey facades here,” said Doiron.
“They were all built for the TV series Dark Angel, which left here in May, 2002. That was one of the draws here. Because of the two- and three-storey facades, it had a back lot feel to it.”
Most of the Dark Angel facades have recently been demolished, but there is still plenty to see. Doiron opened up “Door 13” and led a Sun reporter and photographer into the basement of a building with a 150-foot long tunnel.
“This is where all the spent sand would come in to be recycled,” he said. “From what I understand, they could only heat up the sand so many times before it became waste. This (tunnel) had long conveyors to move the sand from one end of the building to the other.
“When Dark Angel came here they were all excited about how great it looked. They made it look like a sewer tunnel. Two hundred films were probably filmed in here.”
Some of the buildings have an incredible patina, such as a three-storey structure that has a corrugated steel exterior that has rusted in a unique blend of orange, purple, silver and blue.
“All of this is natural. I’ve never let them paint it, I’ve never let them change it. I’ve probably fought off about 50 different production designers that wanted to paint it because it didn’t look natural enough.”
Terminal City Iron Works was founded in 1906 by James Mason and Harry and Thomas Littler. It started off at 140 Alexander and moved to 1949 Albert (the original name for Franklin Street) in 1912.
“It was a small iron foundry, brass foundry and machine shop, then it slowly took over the various lots on that city block,” explains Dale Baldry of Terminal City Manufacturing, which left the old foundry site in 2001 but is still operating in Langley.
Terminal City’s products were used all over the province.
“We basically built British Columbia in the infrastructure stages,” said Baldry.
“We had 100 per cent of the fire hydrants in Vancouver at one time. We still manufacture the Terminal City hydrant and we still sell into a major part of Western Canada.”
The Terminal City foundry closed in 1998, though the company stayed there until it was sold in 2001. Until then it had been owned by three generations of the Mason family, including Stan Mason, who died last year at the age of 88.
The wooden moulds for the various castings were called patterns, and some of the key ones (such as the fire hydrant patterns) went with the new owners to Surrey. But hundreds were left behind in a big open space they call “the pattern loft.”
Doiron had an open house a couple of weeks ago for people in the film industry, and let the masses take away old patterns as souvenirs. But some were too big to lug away, such as a “gate valve” for a dam that would have been used to turn off the water.
The Museum of Vancouver may have a look at the gate valve, as a way of salvaging some of Vancouver’s industrial heritage. And at the Terminal City Iron Works, there’s a lot of it.