Quote:
Originally Posted by counterfactual
Contrast Scotia Square's struggles with Toronto's Eaton Center, built only 8 years after-- unlike SS, EC was smartly built on the main TTC line and IMHO that's a key reason for its success.
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The Eaton Centre isn't perfect but it's also integrated a bit better into its surroundings. It's got clear entrances and you can use it to get from one place to another, whether you're on foot or taking transit. It has improved a lot in recent years with new stores and renovations like what's happening just now with the Scotia Square addition along Barrington.
The Bay Centre in Victoria is another successful urban mall. It's about the same size as the Scotia Square mall but as an overall development it's much smaller. It's on a normal-sized block and from the outside it mostly fits in with the storefront shopping next to it. It also had the Bay as an anchor tenant, and that is one of the few big stores that has survived reasonably well in most Canadian cities. I don't think Halifax ever had a downtown Hudson's Bay; it was already well-established by the time the department store phenomenon was in full swing, whereas a lot of cities farther west grew up around Eaton's and Bay locations that had a huge share of the local market from the beginning.
Downtown Victoria's shops remind me a lot of what's in Halifax, but for better or worse Victoria doesn't really have a distinct "CBD" dominated by office towers like what you find in Halifax. It escaped most of the worst urban planning trends of the 60's and 70's, but also didn't benefit much from the bolder, larger-scale city building of the period. Almost all of downtown Victoria is like Spring Garden Road or Quinpool Road. Victoria feels less built up but I think there are probably also fewer dead zones. It is like a scaled-up smaller town whereas Halifax is like a scaled-down major North American city. Years ago it had a more upscale feel than Halifax, with fewer run-down buildings, but today they seem more on par to me. The comparison is interesting and I'm going on a bit of a digression because I was there recently.
Scotia Square doesn't look inviting in the least and it's not a place you'd casually discover or can easily work into a bigger shopping trip on foot that also takes you by a lot of shops. That could change with a bigger Barrington entrance and improvements to other properties around Barrington/George/Duke. Maybe TD will help a little? The Dennis block could potentially add a lot. There was also a nice proposal to open up the northern end of the Grand Parade with a staircase but it seems nothing has come of that. Just having better streetscaping and wayfinding around Barrington and George/Duke would probably help.