Quote:
Originally Posted by eternallyme
Also re: downtown malls, why have they been an enormous success in Toronto and Ottawa, and even successful in Regina and Saskatoon (their main malls are downtown), yet a total failure in other cities, particularly Winnipeg and the mid-sized southern Ontario cities?
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Regina and Saskatoon are lucky in that their main regional shopping centres are downtown... from what I've seen, I'd say that's very unusual for North American cities, particularly in the western half of the continent. The other malls in those cities are much smaller and don't really compete with Cornwall and Midtown, although I guess big box power centres have eaten into their market share over the last 20 years.
Winnipeg, by contrast, saw its major malls go up in the suburbs. By the time the big downtown mall went up (Portage Place in 1987), the suburban shopping habit was simply too entrenched. I guess Winnipeg is in sort of in an awkward in-between stage where we were big enough to have a bunch of big suburban malls, but the population isn't large enough to support downtown retail.
It's a bit weird... back in the days of The Bay and Eaton's, downtown completely dominated retail in the city up until the 1960s when the first malls began opening up. Once that happened, it took barely 40 years for downtown retail to almost totally dry up. These days, The Bay is pretty much on life support, Portage Place is practically at neighbourhood mall status, and there is very little storefront retail of any kind except for a small cluster in the Exchange District.
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