Brentwood Town Centre Skyline Under Construction, Burnaby

Brentwood Town Centre rises around Lougheed Highway and Willingdon Avenue in Burnaby, with The Amazing Brentwood Tower One still under construction against the North Shore mountains. To the west, Solo District's Altus had already reached full height, part of a new skyline growing out of what had once been a very suburban shopping district.

Brentwood's ambitions started well before the towers.

Brentwood Shopping Centre opened on August 16, 1961. Contemporary newspaper photographs preserved by Vancouver Public Library show crowds at the opening and William Zeckendorf addressing the ceremony alongside Burnaby reeve Alan Emmott. Zeckendorf was not a minor mall developer passing through town. His New York firm, Webb & Knapp, had assembled the East River land that became the United Nations headquarters. Brentwood was another piece of the postwar business of manufacturing new centres from scratch. 

Burnaby soon made that idea municipal policy. By the mid-1960s its planners were identifying Brentwood, Lougheed and the Kingsway-Sussex area as potential town centres rather than allowing apartments and commercial growth to scatter evenly across the municipality. Planning director Tony Parr's department pushed the idea considerably further in Urban Structure, a rather unusual 1971 book principally written by planner Gerhard Sixta. It imagined an "intermittent grid of Metro Towns", dense urban centres connected by rapid transit, with pedestrians separated from much of the machinery of traffic below. 

Then Burnaby got nervous about having too many downtowns.

During the public planning work that followed, the municipality concluded that several full-scale Metro Towns could divide its money and attention. Brentwood and Lougheed were judged to have already developed too strongly around automobiles and regional shopping centres. The Kingsway-Sussex site was chosen instead, and in 1974 council designated it for what became Metrotown. 

Brentwood did not exactly accept demotion quietly. Its 1996 plan again called for a dense, transit-oriented mixed-use core centred on Brentwood Mall, explicitly acknowledging the need to overcome the barrier created by Lougheed Highway and Willingdon Avenue. The language is revealing: the old mall was described as the linchpin from which something resembling an urban centre could be assembled. 

By 2017, Burnaby's new Metrotown plan was still trying to settle the family argument, stating that its goal was to establish Metrotown as the city's "true Downtown." 

The following spring, Tower One at The Amazing Brentwood topped out. Altus, completed just west of it in 2017, was already Burnaby's tallest building. A second Brentwood tower was climbing beside the first. The old shopping centre remained underneath all of it, increasingly difficult to pick out from a distance. 

On paper, Metrotown had won.

The skyline was becoming argumentative.