The Blue Cabin will get a new life

NORTH VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – A blue cabin that symbolizes an era when workers lived on the shores of North Vancouver will live on after all.

Back in 2015, it was removed from the Dollarton waterfront in North Vancouver to make way for a new development, and it’s been sitting in a warehouse ever since.

But the people who have been trying to save it have now been able to move it to Maplewood Farm where it’s going to get a retrofit as an artist’s residence.

Glenn Alteen with the Blue Cabin Committee figures the cabin is about a hundred years old, but it was moved from Vancouver’s Coal Harbour to Dollarton’s waterfront back in the 1930s.

It was one of several squatter shacks sitting on waterfronts in Steveston, Kitsilano and Stanley Park decades ago.

The Blue Cabin is only 25 feet by 13 feet but Alteen says it serves as a reminder about how shipyard workers used to live.

“There’s a squatting history involved in it, and there’s also a maritime-industrial history involved in it. It puts together a couple of different histories that is in danger of being lost.”

Once the cabin is restored next year, Alteen says it and a small house will be put on a barge and become home to an artist and moored in different spots along Burrard Inlet and False Creek.

Saving the cabin hasn’t been cheap.

“We have raised about $300,000. We are just now trying to figure out how we will put the cabin back on the water – like what kind of barge we’ll be putting it on. We think that will take another $200,000,” says Alteen.

He wants the cabin to be opened to the public once it’s fully restored and operating as part of an artist’s residence.

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