Posted Oct 7, 2024, 4:59 PM
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Touching grass everyday.
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Join Date: Oct 2003
Location: Otisburgh
Posts: 51,387
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Ontario’s failed downtown malls
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Bayside Mall, formerly the Sarnia Eaton Centre, on a Saturday morning. Most stores are vacant or occupied by non-profits or independent businesses.
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The Toronto Eaton Centre, large, famous, and vital, is only one of many malls built in the downtown cores of Ontario cities between the 1960s and 1990s. From Thunder Bay to Cornwall, the construction of new enclosed shopping centres were seen as a necessary tool to keep the old city centres vibrant and relevant in the face of competition from new suburban malls. But only in the province’s two largest cities did the concept work. Elsewhere, these urban shopping complexes were left largely vacant within ten years of opening, when leases expired. When the Eaton’s department chain went bankrupt in 1997, huge voids were left behind that developers and municipalities struggled to fill.
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In Hamilton, a massive downtown urban renewal project in the 1960s and 1970s saw over a dozen city blocks cleared for new commercial and civic buildings. The centrepiece was Jackson Square, a mall with over 200 stores and services with a rooftop patio. Connected to the mall were the Eaton’s store (later redeveloped as Hamilton Eaton Centre), a new central library, two office towers, a hotel, and a new farmer’s market building. The first phase of Jackson Square opened in 1972.
Kitchener soon followed Hamilton’s example, demolishing its own city hall (the clock tower now stands in Victoria Park) for Market Square, which opened in 1974. Eaton’s moved down the street into the new shopping centre. Sudbury’s City Centre was a similar municipally-backed project to revitalize its downtown core; Eaton’s opened there in 1975.
The pace of downtown mall openings quickened in the late 1970s and 1980s as the provincial government provided assistance through the Ontario Downtown Redevelopment Program. From Thunder Bay to Cornwall, the province backed over a dozen mall developments, and more often than not, Eaton’s was the lead anchor. The smallest downtown mall to open was in Tillsonburg, whose population was only 11,000 in the 1980s. Sears only anchored three downtown malls built in this era, in Chatham, Cornwall, and Kitchener’s King Centre. The last malls to open under this scheme were the London Galleria, which opened in 1989 as a major expansion to Eaton’s Wellington Square (and included a new Bay department store), and Hamilton Eaton Centre, a postmodern atrium connected to Jackson Square that opened in 1990.
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