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North Vancouver's Lonsdale may be Metro's most under-achieving major street. First West Broadway, then West 4th and now West 10th have seen retail renewal and rows of new flats above shops. Vancouver's Commercial Drive and Main Street, plus Marine Drive in West Vancouver have joined this surge towards more interesting, re-jigged, pedestrian-friendly arterials. South Fraser and Victoria Streets are miracles of a different sort — alive with the immigrant communities that surround them, home to some of the best value grocers and restaurants in our entire metropolis. Just don't tell anyone about these gems, lest these Eastside streets be Starbuck-ed and sushi-ed into conformity.

Then there is sad-sack Lonsdale. With strings of franchise outlets and national chain stores relieved only by a welcome Persian deli or café here and there, Upper Lonsdale might as well be in Kamloops or Prince George. Lower Lonsdale once had character, but that was knocked out when key historic buildings were demolished and the small shops migrated away. This is because sites were acquired by big-time developers ramping the street and its environs up to some big-time future — one that has no space for mere Mom & Pop produce or hardware stores.

There is now a raft of new medium- to high-rise development flanking either side of Lonsdale, from the waterfront up the hill to above 20th Street. North Vancouver has opted for strict height limits on these condo towers, tending to make them wider and bulkier than their cousins across Burrard Inlet. City planning controls also mandate no more than three storeys for nearly the length of Lonsdale, keeping it a low-scale vestige — a hamster run surrounded by squat caged gorillas. Lonsdale has thus become the inverse of Vancouver's redeveloped arterials, where density is being added along commercial avenues, shaping new walls for the single family zones within.

The biggest changes of all are currently under construction or awaiting approval for the very foot of Lonsdale, between the yarrows where victory ships were once built and the quay where the SeaBus comes and goes. Here resides the true 900 pound gorilla of the entire North Shore — the massively gruff, multi-block, multiple-building development called The Pier, from Pinnacle International.

While it is true that the City of North Vancouver extracted a number of public benefits from this monster — waterfront lands and industrial building shells for a possible Maritime Centre, a widening and embellishment of The Esplanade, which it flanks — one of the benefits they did not extract is superior architecture and urban design.

The Pier's façades, now coming into view as construction completes for some of them, are an amalgam of Victoria-style brick fuzziness with Yaletown's glass-is-grand monotony. While some of this is a matter of taste, The Pier's weak urban design on one of the Lower Mainland's most prominent and interesting sites will, I feel, be regretted for decades. Amongst many questionable urban design decisions by I.B.I/Hancock-Bruckner architects was the pushing of a condo-hotel building almost flush to the corner of Lonsdale and The Esplanade.

With this key intersection visually constricting and entering into The Pier's shadow much of the day. We are losing a delightful and dramatic shift of vista when walking down Lonsdale's hill — the splendid diagonal views out to the former shipyards, and beyond these, towards the eastern stretches of Vancouver's own waterfront. Why would the City of North Vancouver to continue to hold down the height of Lonsdale's buildings up hill, then lift them way up right here, where their sunlight- and view-gobbling impact is by far the greatest? For a large site with other options, this is beyond baffling.

Across Lonsdale from The Pier is a very different urban design approach is proposed by Millennium Group, with Henriquez Partners as architects. A spire where The Pier proposes a wall of condos, all apartments are consolidated here into a single extra-tall tower, set in mid-block where it should be to minimize impact on Lonsdale and uphill neighbours (who will complain anyway, such being the price of the cult of the view in our town.) Project architect Gregory Henriquez tapers the top of the condo tower like the prow of a ship (in fact, the locally-famous S.S. Princess Louise), serving both to reduce the visual impact of penthouse floors, and to craft an icon denoting local history.

It is pure schmaltz to memorialize this long-moored vessel which spent most of its service life serving up fried seafood dinners, but nonetheless, the urban design and public benefit package offered up by Millennium Developments is impressive. Conceived in part to compensate for the negative impacts of The Pier, they propose terminating Lonsdale in a lively waterfront plaza, with views to the comings and goings of Seabuses, tugboats, the to-be-revived Wallace Shipyards, and the entire drama of a Vancouver harbour that is increasingly sealed off from its citizens by marinas and insensitive waterside development.

Hovering above this plaza the developer intends to pay for construction of a permanent home for the Presentation House Gallery, the first and likely only key cultural institution to find a home on our waterfront. With stakes upped by the design mistakes nearby, the proposal goes to North Vancouver's city council for re-zoning approval and height cap exemption early next year, and may be the last, best chance to forge the architectural landmark the North Shore has long needed.