B.C. Sugar Refinery (Rogers Sugar), East Vancouver

Photographed across the rail-side yards near Powell Street, the B.C. Sugar Refinery, now operated as the Rogers Sugar refinery, reads as a working piece of Vancouver’s port infrastructure: concrete silos, conveyor runs, a tall stack, and service bridges stitched together behind chain-link fencing. The refinery was established in 1890 by B.T. Rogers, when Vancouver was still a new city, and sugar refining at the port has continued since the early 1890s.

City of Vancouver Archives notes it as the city’s first major industrial venture not tied to fishing or forestry, and records that the facility can produce up to 240,000 tonnes of sugar per year from imported raw cane sugar.

Even today, it sits in public view as both industry and backdrop, a site locals recognize from the drive along Powell Street and, increasingly, as a film location that keeps getting recast without changing its fundamentals.