As Anvil Centre and Merchant Square go up, scaffolding is already starting to come down.
Construction of the new Anvil Centre civic facility and Merchant Square office tower continue on Columbia Street. The facility is expected to be complete by May 2014.
“It’s quite exciting. It doesn’t take the contractor long to do a floor, like three weeks. Within three months, quite a bit of the floors of the office tower went up,” said Terry Atherton, the city’s manager of civic buildings and properties. “They are starting to take the scaffolding down from the exterior. On Begbie, all the scaffolding is down. You can see the limestone.”
The contractors recently poured the 11th floor of the office tower. Once cement for the 12th floor is poured, the contractors will work on the “lower roof”, the penthouses and an elevator/machine room that will be at the top of the office tower.
“There are a few different roofs,” Atherton said. “The main roof is the one just above Level 12. They say Level 12 is going to be poured around the 22nd or 23rd of this month.”
More than 40 trades continue to work on the Columbia Street site that’s located between Eighth and Begbie Streets. At this time, the City of New Westminster is anticipating the project will be completed on schedule.
“It’s within a day,” Atherton said. “Remember they had the fire. They were closed for the day because of all the smoke. So it was like a day late now.”
Interior walls are now being created in Anvil Centre, which is expected to be complete by May.
“It’s looking very nice. When you start closing walls in and putting drywall on the interior walls, that’s when you start to see it in more of its final form,” said Atherton, who visited the site Nov. 14. “Right now, they have poured all the concrete stairs, all the staircases. You know then it is going to look spectacular. When you are on the fourth floor and you look down in the atrium, the canyon, that is when you see how elegant the building is going to be.”
Lisa Spitale, the city’s chief administrative officer, recently toured Anvil Centre and was amazed at what she saw. Having last visited the site in June, she was
thrilled to see the angles and details she’d viewed on blueprints come alive.
“I am walking through there – I had tears in my eyes,” she said. “All the things I had seen on drawings before – drawings are so flat. It was just beautiful. I was going room by room thinking, this looks amazing. It is still concrete but you could get a better sense of the room and how the columns inside work.”
Atherton agrees.
“It’s lines on a drawing. When it becomes a reality, it’s very different. The renderings that we have had before really don’t do it justice,” he said. “The limestone wall actually comes into the building and goes into the canyon – I am looking forward to looking at that. That’s going to be quite stunning.”
Mayor Wayne Wright is excited about a tour he’ll be taking of the building at the end of the month
“It is magical,” he said of the building.
