New Westminster’s waterfront today is a mixed-use area of commercial, industrial and residential properties. However, it may not have turned out that way: The area could just have easily been overrun with condo developments.

So how did the city’s waterfront become what it is? And how has it, and the public perception of the waterfront, changed over the years?

These questions and others are explored in a new exhibit, Our Working Waterfront: 1945-2015, opening Thursday, July 9 at the New Westminster Museum and Archives.

Four years in the making, the collection includes 75 maps (one for each year covered), archival photos and oral histories.

Following the end of its run Oct. 27, a library of free, publicly accessible material will be made available through the New Westminster Archives.

The exhibit is a collaboration between a number of groups, from Simon Fraser University professors and students to New Westminster civic employees and retired longshoremen. We talked to SFU anthropology professor Pamela Stern, one of the main researchers on the project (along with lead investigator, SFU Associate Professor of Urban Studies Peter Hall), about Our Working Waterfront.

Q: What did you want to show with this project?

A: The waterfront looks so different today than it did 20 years ago, and certainly different than it did 40 years ago. It’s easy to forget that what we see today is so new. As industry moves onto green fields someplace else, ports move downstream, we revalue the land and we forget it was ever valued for industrial work. Then we treat these new spaces like they’re too valuable for industry.

Fifty years ago, no right-minded person would have thought to live on the waterfront — it was subject to flooding, it was swampy and buggy — and those were prime industrial spaces, and we used the water for so much transportation.

But ports have consolidated, the lumber industry has transformed so that it’s not on our urban waterfronts anymore. And we’ve hardened the dikes on the river so it’s less likely to flood. Now everyone wants to live there.

Q: Is there something unique about the New Westminster waterfront?

A: Yes and no. In some respects, New West can stand for so many different places in the world where an industrial waterfront is now a park or condominiums or boardwalk: London’s Docklands, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor or San Francisco or even False Creek.

Each place is also a little bit unique. The deindustrialization and redevelopment of New Westminster’s waterfront is one of the earliest in the Lower Mainland. It’s taken a long time to be redeveloped to the point where it is today. Other places have transformed much more quickly. I think we have a better result in part because it did take so long. Initially there were plans that would have made it much more exclusive: It would have been a wall of condominiums where today there’s a beautiful, well-used park.

Q: A number of longshoremen took SFU history professor Willeen Keough’s oral history practicum course. Apparently one in particular, Dean Johnson, really threw himself into the project.

A: Dean’s a retired longshoreman. He grew up in New Westminster, quit school at about age 16, took a job on the waterfront, worked there 46 years before he retired. Dean is one of the people who really took to this idea of gathering oral histories of longshoremen.