Crane Park (Vancouver)

 park, historic landmark

Currently under construction

In the Second World War 2,000 steelworkers laboured inside the Canron Building, then known as Western Bridge, fabricating large sections of 10,000 freighters to replace the ships sunk by German U-boats in the North Atlantic. Just outside the building 3,000 shipbuilders working for Westcoast Shipbuilders assembled and launched a total of 55 of these 10,000 ton freighters in just 4 years. Westcoast Shipbuilders and Western Bridge were also the site of giant Victory Bond rallies where stars like Susan Hayward, Barbara Stanwyck, Jack Benny and Rochester came to entertain thousands of workers and cajole them into buying war bonds.

From war's end until 1990, workers in the Canron Building were fabricating steel for sites all over the world, as well as for downtown Vancouver highrises, the Alex Fraser Bridge, West Edmonton Mall, Canada Place, Seattle’s Husky Stadium, and for the largest free-standing building in the world, the Boeing plant in Everett, Washington. Canron moved out in 1990 and the huge historic building was torn down in 1998.

In 1998 city council authorized the spending of $100,000 to set aside representative pieces of the Canron Building as a historical legacy for use in the Southeast False Creek redevelopment. One of the 50 ton overhead gantry cranes (the single most important piece of equipment in the building) and 4 A-frames used for supporting the 2 tracks on which it moved were saved, as well as a few steel columns that might be used in some way to mark the footprint of the building.