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But a spokesperson for the City of Vancouver said “the applicant for the rezoning of the old post-office site has requested that the rezoning application be put on hold while they review their options for the site.”

Canada Post sold its former main downtown branch at 349 West Georgia St. in 2013, when it decided to move to a new building by the airport. The old post office was bought for $159 million by B.C. Investment Management Corp., one of Canada’s largest institutional investment managers.

The building opened in 1958, and is considered a fine example of the International Modern style. It was designed by McCarter and Nairne, the architects that designed the Marine Building, and is on Vancouver’s heritage register.

Photo by Charlie Warner / PNG

The interior is open and spacious. The biggest spaces are two storeys high and feature column-free areas that are almost as long as a football field. The building also has 2½ storeys of underground parking.

“It was built as a processing and distribution centre,” said John Atkin, a heritage expert. “So you had trucks come in, trucks go out, sorting, and big open spaces, so that you could run complex postal-sorting machines and conveyor belts, and all that stuff. So you have almost the perfect existing structure waiting there for a firm that would do stuff like Amazon, which is product in and product out.”

Amazon already has a large and growing presence in Metro Vancouver. In November, the Seattle company said it was leasing 150,000 sq. ft. of space in a nine-storey building that is going up at the southwest corner of Dunsmuir and Homer streets, which is across the street from the post office.