Mountain Plaza

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Not all are enthralled by plans for new Mountain Plaza mall

Jennifer Villamere July 25, 2008 Mountain News

An open house was held last week to unveil plans and share details about the planned redevelopment of the Mountain Plaza Mall.
Smart Centres, the retail development company that purchased the mall in the fall of 2006, hosted the open house as a way of opening the lines of communication between the mall owners, tenants and the community that the shopping center serves.
Reaction to redevelopment plans has been mixed, at best. The planned redevelopment will see the enclosed shopping center largely leveled and replaced with big box stores.
"Opinion is very divided," admits Christine Cyte, Smart Centres' land development representative. "People are either very excited about the redevelopment and they want to know how soon we can start, or it's a situation where they've been living here for the past 40 years, they've grown up with the mall and they want to see it stay the way it is," she says.
"We're not living in the past," contends Murray Aikman, a past-president of the Hamilton Mountain Heritage Society who is concerned with the proposed redevelopment. "We understand the need for change. But I am concerned about how people will safely move on foot from one end of the complex to the other once the mall is no longer enclosed," he says. "I was told by (Smart Centres) that they were going to provide walkways and so on but nevertheless, if there's a young mother pushing a baby carriage or a person who has a walker or a scooter, it's going to be a bit of a challenge especially in the snow or rain," he says. "A lot of the people that go there currently are Boomer-age and beyond, there's also a lot of young mothers who go there and I think they have appreciated the convenience of being inside up until now."
Cyte says Smart Centres' tenants are demanding the big box overhaul. "An unenclosed shopping center is the format that all of our tenants are looking to us to build. They come to us and they say this is what we want," she says.
Aikman understands that Smart Centres is responding to the needs of the retailers, but wonders who will respond to the needs of the customers. "The reasoning for abandoning the (enclosed) mall concept is that retailers have to contribute financially towards the security, maintenance, heating and cooling of the common areas," he explains. "The stores want to do away with that part of their overhead and be in stand-alone buildings. However, I wonder: Who really cares about the customer in all this?"
His other area of concern is the loss of the mall's community atmosphere. "It's a place where people gather for coffee and to meet with friends," says Aikman. "The new format will cut down on the mingling that you have now."
Cyte allows that the unenclosed format is "something that a lot of people aren't thrilled about." But she points to the mall's crumbling infrastructure as a further indication that change is needed. "Unfortunately, the mall is deteriorating. There are leaks in the roof all over the place," she says. Cyte says Smart Centres is responding to customer feedback like Aikman's concerns by maintaining the enclosed format for a small portion of the mall the far north end, a section of the mall which is currently anchored by a Payless Shoe Source store. "That's where we'll keep a lot of the existing tenants in the mall," she says. "We'll be putting in some small restaurants, there will be benches, there will be seating, there will be places where people can congregate," she says.
Although Smart Centres has yet to attain a few remaining approvals from the the city, the company is hoping to begin construction this fall. Cyte says the first step will to be construct a safer entrance to the site featuring a traffic signal. "After that, we'll start construction of buildings in the parking lot towards Upper James," she says. "That will create enough space so that we can relocate tenants from inside the mall to the new space. After that, we'll start demolition from the south end. The rest of it will keep rolling from there."