The Museum of North Vancouver: Not Another COVID Casualty
By Sandra Thomas, Freelance Writer
When a new museum is decades in the making, there’s a lot to consider. In the case of MONOVA: Museum and Archives of North Vancouver, those forty-plus years included a multitude of meaningful discussions with community members and Indigenous leaders, painstaking research to amass a collection of more than 9000 artifacts, and the undertaking to secure the ideal location — the historic Shipyards District of North Vancouver.
But in 2020, just when it looked as though the stars had finally aligned and construction of the new 16,000-square-foot museum was coming together enough to start considering dates for a public opening, COVID-19 reached a point of global crisis, bringing most of the world to an abrupt halt.