Graffiti News

A street section makes underground work visible

Greg Snider’s Project for a Public Works Yard brings Vancouver’s buried infrastructure into view by presenting a street as an exposed cross-section. According to The Province, the sculpture was commissioned for the opening of the National Works Yard in 2004. It stands at the northwest corner of National Avenue and Chess Street in the False Creek flats, beside municipal work facilities.

A raised sidewalk supports familiar street fixtures: a fire hydrant, a storm drain, a parking meter, a street light and a traffic light. Below that surface, pipes and valves show the systems that pedestrians normally pass without seeing. Many of the components are cast iron. The arrangement lets viewers connect an object above ground with the equipment beneath it.

For people who follow street art, the work offers a different way to look at a streetscape. Its subject is the street’s own construction. Reading the sculpture means looking down as well as up, and treating the gap beneath the pavement as part of the public view.

Municipal labour gives the sculpture its subject

Snider designed the installation to represent the range of work carried out through the works yard. The retired Simon Fraser University visual art teacher told The Province that the proposal covered engineering, electrical systems, parking, water mains, storm drainage and sanitary sewers. Gas infrastructure also appears, although Snider noted that gas lines are outside the city’s direct remit.

The city’s then-art consultants, Barb Cole and Mike Banwell, invited him to propose a work because his practice addressed labour. His central observation was that infrastructure workers make elaborate systems that disappear beneath the ground once the job is finished. The sculpture gives that hidden effort a lasting, visible form.

The commission was worth $90,000, and construction took a year and a half. Snider estimated that about $11,000 remained after his expenses. City staff helped prepare components, including cutting pieces open to expose their interiors. That assistance connects the artwork’s production with the workers it depicts.

Vancouver’s head of public art, Krystal Paraboo, told The Province that works yard employees bring their families to see the sculpture. In that setting, public art becomes a way to explain an occupation: a worker can point to a visible pipe, fitting or connection when describing something usually hidden.

Colour and cutaways explain the utility connections

The sculpture uses colour to distinguish systems and cut surfaces to reveal how individual parts work. Snider identifies blue with water, including an eight-inch main beneath the hydrant. Bright yellow marks a gas connection into a house, while the sanitary sewer leaving a house connects to an orange pipe. Viewers can follow both the street network and its branches towards a home.

The exposed hydrant also has a practical audience. Snider told The Province that trainees from the neighbouring fire training facility come to inspect it because the facility lacks a cutaway hydrant of its own. The same detail can reward an ordinary visit: the interior turns a familiar silhouette into an understandable mechanism.

Several fittings came from Terminal City Iron Works. According to the newspaper, its Victoria Drive industrial site closed in 2015, while the business moved to Langley. Snider recovered one heavily rusted valve from a Burnaby storage yard, dismantled and cleaned it, and found that it still worked. The component carries a history of manufacture and repair alongside its role in the composition.

Refurbishment changes what visitors can see

The refurbishment restored components and brought the sculpture’s traffic lights into operation, The Province reports. Rusted parts were taken down, sandblasted and reinstalled. Snider retained the original street light, which had been shortened to roughly three metres, because a replacement would have been too tall for the work.

The traffic light had originally remained inactive because the city considered extending National Avenue as a connection to Clark Drive. A working signal in the artwork might have confused drivers. That connection did not proceed, allowing the artwork’s signal to be connected. The report gives no specific refurbishment date.

To see the work, use the National Avenue and Chess Street corner as the location reference, with the works yard, municipal gas station and fire training facility as neighbouring landmarks. Take in the raised street surface first, then follow the coloured pipes below it. The relationship between those two levels supplies the sculpture’s clearest explanation of the city’s daily maintenance.

Find other public artworks and murals nearby through Wallscape’s map.

Source: The Province