The heart of the (Re) Claiming the New Westminster Waterfront project is the collection of oral history interviews conducted with 100 people who work or worked on the New Westminster waterfront between 1945 and 2015. The interviews were conducted by SFU students enrolled in Willeen Keough’s Oral History Practicum (SA461) in Spring 2014, retired longshoremen, especially Dean Johnson, and other members of the project team.

Most narrators gave permission for their oral histories to be made available to the public. These oral history files may be accessed here. They have all been summarized. You can choose to listen to interviews with longshoremen, shipbuilders, marine construction workers, retailers along Columbia Street, tugboat drivers, and many more.

It is also possible to listen to all the oral history interviews, including the few with restrictions on publication and distribution, at the New Westminster Archives.

Here are a few examples:

Bill Burnett, retired river pilot

Les Gunderson, wooden ship builder, Queensborough

Helen Hughan, retired secretary at Mercer Star Shipyards, Queensborough