The Post Under Construction Above Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

Construction cranes over The Post redevelopment at 349 West Georgia Street frame the Downtown Eastside and the Port of Vancouver beyond. The building underneath them began life as Vancouver's Main Post Office, a city-block-sized machine designed to move mail between downtown, the railway and the waterfront.

When it opened in 1958, the post office was enormous: nearly 689,000 square feet, then the largest building in Vancouver and, according to the City's heritage research, the largest welded-steel-frame structure in the world. A Vancouver Sun headline had already christened the proposal the "Taj Mahal with escalators" five years earlier.

The grandeur was mostly in service of logistics. Trucks could circulate through the building on multiple levels. Inside were ramps, chutes, elevators and huge open sorting floors. Beneath the street, tunnels and conveyors connected the post office toward the waterfront. One underground conveyor system ran roughly 730 metres to the railway facilities around Waterfront Station.

It was an impressive answer to a problem that immediately started changing.

The tunnel-and-conveyor system had been designed around mail arriving by rail and water. By the 1960s, trucks and aircraft were taking over enough of that work that the system was already becoming obsolete. The post office survived the technological shift, eventually processing mail for British Columbia and the Yukon, but Canada Post finally transferred its major Vancouver processing operations to a new facility near the airport in 2014.

The building then faced the usual Vancouver choice: demolition or reinvention.

Reinvention won. The old postal podium was protected as a heritage building and stripped open for what became The Post. Two office towers were inserted into the enormous existing structure, much of the original exterior was retained, and the industrial floors that once sorted letters were rebuilt for offices, retail and public space. The engineering got fairly serious. During the conversion, parts of the existing foundation were lowered one column at a time so another parking level could be created underneath.

By late 2020, the cranes in this photograph were building upward for Amazon.

A mail plant being rebuilt for a technology company. A century-old hotel advertisement hanging on behind it. Container cranes still working at the harbour in the distance.

The delivery methods changed.

The city kept moving things.