The can be little question now that 2735 Granville Street is being fitted out to be a new RBC Royal Bank branch.

Fine print on a notice affixed to one of the one-storey property’s glass doors explicitly identifies an RBC representative associated with the renovation project.

And an honest-to-goodness bank vault appears to rapidly be taking shape toward the back of the formerly wide open and undivided floor space.

Can’t have a bank branch without a vault

The appearance of what can only be a bank vault supports previous reports on this website that, by October, the South Granville RBC bank branch will be moving out of the four-storey RBC Royal Bank building at 1489 West Broadway, where it has been located in since 1957 and moving into 2735 Granville Street, a property located three blocks away that has been two years under renovation.

The fact that the bank vault at 2735 Granville Street was not built as a permanent part of the structural renovations and is instead now being added in after the fact is also significant, in light of the partial blueprints I found June 28 for the redevelopment of 1489 West Broadway as a mixed-use tower.

Those redevelopment blueprints are dated May 24, 2019 and were drawn up by architects Musson Cattell Mackey for developer PCI—owner of 1489 West Broadway since 2007.

They show, not only the entrance to the Granville Street station for the future Broadway subway (expected to begin construction in 2020) but also an RBC bank branch on the ground floor of the new building.

Based on the blueprints, it can be supposed that the move by the bank branch out of 1489 West Broadway will only be temporary—for the length of time that it takes to redevelop the site.

The RBC bank branch will then move into the new building at 1489 West Broadway.

The fact that the bank vault at 2735 South Granville is to be a temporary addition tends to buttress the supposition that the bank branch itself will be temporary.