It's an end to not just one but two eras on the North Vancouver waterfront.
With the scrapping of the HMS Flamborough Head stern, the city loses one of the most visible reminders of its waterfront as a place of shipbuilding during the Second World War.
It also is the epilogue to the story of the National Maritime Museum - the project the stern was brought back home for but never came to fruition due to a lack of senior government funding.
Instead, it sat as a dead pigeon-filled, rusty monument to what could have been - and an expensive one at that.
There's no getting back the $300,000 the city spent to bring the ship stern and set it up on Lot 5, nor the $80,000 spent moving it, nor the up-to $250,000 it will spend getting rid of it.
While it is a sad loss of history, and a galling loss of citizens' tax dollars, there's no one who could have foreseen the trajectory this story would follow.
That said, it would have been nice to see council at least try to find another fate for the piece of history it acquired and reach out to the public for input and possibly help.
But if the Flamborough Head must be lost, there is a lesson to be gained here. The city needs to clarify how much of its history it wants to incorporate into the waterfront and what it is willing to do to include it. What it has done to date was based on a maritime museum being on the waterfront. Now that and the ship it was to house are gone, are there other priorities to re-order? Those questions will be before council in the new year and we'd hate to see any more good opportunities scuttled.
