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When North Vancouver city planner Richard White sees hordes of construction workers with their tool boxes in tow on site of the new Pier development on the city's waterfront, it evokes memories of a time long ago when it housed one of the largest shipyards in Canada.

Back then, thousands of workers filed out after punching the clock with their lunchboxes in hand, catching trolleys or a ferry to take them home after a hard day. Buses eventually replaced trolleys, however, and the sea bus replaced the ferry.

"It was a pretty important part of our community," Mr. White, deputy director of community development for the City of North Vancouver, says of the shipyard. "It was the reason why many people in the city lived here."

But like the trolleys of old, the shipyard is being replaced. After the Burrard Dry Dock closed in the early 1990s, the site sat stagnant for years. The redevelopment process has begun, but there's still a long way to go. Situated at the bottom of Lonsdale, the city's main drag, the site's been frozen in time where salt-laced winds wafting off Burrard Inlet have rusted the skeletal frames of buildings with names such as "the erection shop." The city was gunning for a lucrative contract from Ottawa to build a Polar 8 icebreaker at the yard, but lost out, and business eventually sank, taking nearly a century of history along with it.

"You couldn't go to Japan to buy a ship in the Second World War; they wouldn't sell," Mr. White jokes, although the yard's contribution to the allied war effort is no joke.

More supply ships were built here in the Second World War than at any other shipyard in Canada, and it employed the first female welder in Canada in the summer of 1942. The number of women employed ballooned to 149 by the winter.

However, in an area not known for eyesores, the decrepit scene dogged city officials for a long time.

"Something had to happen," Mr. White told The Globe and Mail in an interview. "It was actually starting to become a drag on the lower Lonsdale area."

Fast forward a few years, and enter developer Pinnacle International. The land is now slated for a nearly 1.4 million-square-foot community that mixes the old with the new, right down to old C clamps that hold aged wooden benches together while preventing a more modern problem from festering in the area -- skateboarding.

And to pave over the area's rich history was not the city's intention, Mr. White said.

"What makes this place special is not necessarily what you build new, but what you have that's old that you can incorporate into the development," he says.

Architect John Bingham and landscape architect Peter Kreuk are among those responsible for such an historic undertaking. Mr. Bingham's firm developed plans for the north side of Esplanade Street, where towers are taking form now, but much of the design for the south side was left to Vancouver architectural firm IBI/HB.

The south side will house the new community's amenities, and several of the old buildings are being refurbished, breathing new life into an area haunted by an industry long dead.

Mr. Bingham describes the development as a "coming of age for the city."

"It was a pretty run down area," he said in an interview. "With the demise of the shipbuilding industry, it went into decay, and never really found its true direction."

The direction in which he took the site was up, with three residential towers that will "provide a backdrop to what's really going to be the important part, which is the south side [of the street]."

The development is still pending city approval -- council makes its final decision in September -- but if everything goes as planned, the south site will be home to a hotel, restaurants, and a national maritime museum that will pay homage to the shipyard's contribution to not only the history of North Vancouver, but also the history of shipbuilding in Western Canada.

The opening of the Burrard Dry Dock Pier last year restored public access to the area after almost a century. Pedestrian access to the site is particularly important since the tourist draw will surely jump during the 2010 Olympics, not to mention upon completion of the proposal for nearly 1,100 residential dwellings. That's where landscape architect Peter Kreuk's firm, Durante Kreuk, came in.

"The heritage of the site has played a very important role," Mr. Kreuk said in an interview. "You take a bit of the Granville Island concept . . . it'll be a much more dense, pedestrian-oriented space than North Vancouver is used to."

Mr. Kreuk's firm has the Herculean task of taking the rough, industrial land and transforming it into a family and tourist-friendly place, while staying true to the site's heritage. Many shipbuilding relics of the past still litter the site such as old trucks, cranes, tanks, and transformers that hopefully won't have to be scrapped. Through signage, plaques, and walkways such as the "punch-clock portal," Mr. Kreuk hopes the design stays true to the shipyard feel, while still being pedestrian friendly like Granville Island.

"It won't be as green as Granville Island, but it'll be close," he says. "From the heritage perspective, they wanted the site to look as much like an old shipyard as possible, which of course had no trees on it, but we had to get down to the reality that people are going to use this site."

Perhaps the foremost authority on the shipyard is archivist and historian Francis Mansbridge, author of the 2002 retrospective, Launching History: The Saga of the Burrard Dry Dock. While he says the development has taken a long time, his impatience isn't marked by frustration, but anticipation.

"I think it will be a place for people to come like Granville Island," Mr. Mansbridge said in a phone interview. "It'll be a really essential part of the whole North Vancouver experience."

Architect John Bingham agrees.

"It always looked like it was somewhere waiting for something to happen," he says. "There's a lot of consideration of these lands around North America now being rejuvenated, bringing people back into them."

These spaces in many cases are really livable if they're planned out. In fact, they're livable to beyond our expectations," he added.