Alfred Wallace - Andy, to everyone - started with fishing boats, and in 1909 his boatworks burned down and was abandoned. He had already incorporated Wallace Shipyards in 1905 and moved the following year to a bigger site at the foot of Lonsdale Avenue in North Vancouver, directly across the inlet from the young city of Vancouver. On 11 July 1911 that yard burned too. It was rebuilt immediately, which tells you most of what you need to know about the temperament of the operation. Shipyards are flammable places - timber, pitch, oil, hot rivets - and the industry's early history is a long argument between fire and stubbornness. At Lonsdale, stubbornness won twice.

The First World War transformed a regional boatyard into an industrial concern. Wallace Shipyards took a contract to manufacture shells for 18-pounder guns, then built six large cargo schooners and three freighters for the merchant marine - the first deep-sea steel-hulled ships ever built in Canada. To handle the wooden schooners the company opened Number 2 Yard west of the Squamish reserve, on ground now occupied by the North Shore Auto Mall; it was leased to the William Lyall Shipbuilding Company in 1917, which turned out 27 wooden ships there before closing in 1920. The company took the name Burrard Dry Dock in 1921 and installed Vancouver's first floating drydock four years later. Andy Wallace died in 1929, and his son Clarence took over a yard that no longer resembled the one his father had founded.

In 1928 the yard launched something almost comically modest by its own standards: a 104-foot auxiliary schooner for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, designed by Tom Halliday on the model of Roald Amundsen's Maud. She was built of Douglas fir and sheathed in Australian eucalyptus so that Arctic ice would grind at hardwood rather than at her frames. Named St. Roch, she spent the years from 1940 to 1942 becoming the first vessel to run the Northwest Passage from west to east, then in 1944 the first to make the passage in both directions. On 29 May 1950 she completed the first circumnavigation of North America. Since 1962 she has sat under a roof at the Vancouver Maritime Museum, a National Historic Site of Canada - a wooden boat from a steel yard, and the most famous thing it ever made.

Between 1940 and 1945 Burrard Dry Dock became the busiest shipyard in Canada. It built 109 Park and Fort class freighters - Canada's answer to the Liberty ship - along with corvettes, minesweepers, landing ships and Admiralty maintenance vessels of the Beachy Head class, and it converted and outfitted 19 escort carriers for the Royal Navy. Demand outran the North Shore site, so a South Yard opened at the foot of McLean Avenue across the water. Employment peaked at 14,000, of whom about 1,000 were women. They came into a trade that had never wanted them, learned welding and riveting and crane work in a matter of weeks, and were expected to leave again when the war ended. Most did. The ships they built carried the Allied war effort across two oceans.

Consolidation followed victory. Burrard bought Yarrows of Esquimalt in 1946, the neighbouring North Vancouver Ship Repairs in 1951, and the assets of Victoria Machinery Depot in 1967, closing that yard at once. The Wallace family sold out in 1972 to Cornat Industries, part of the Canfor group; the merged operation became Burrard Yarrows and then, in 1985, Versatile Pacific Shipyards. A Panamax-class drydock and new cranes went in at North Vancouver in 1982. Then Ottawa cancelled the Polar 8 icebreaker, the enormous contract the yard had been built up to fulfil, and in 1992 Versatile Pacific went bankrupt. The North Vancouver yard closed and the last workers were laid off. A plan for a National Maritime Museum of the Pacific on the site was shelved in 2010 when provincial funding never arrived. What went up instead was housing, retail and public space - the restored Pipe Shop and Coppersmiths Shop, Shipyard Plaza, Craneway Plaza, and those two cranes with nothing to lift.