What to do with City Centre?
Most big names have left - we need nonretail tenants who care about Hamilton
January 09, 2009
Paul Wilson
The Hamilton Spectator
http://www.thespec.com/Entertainment...article/493171
The signs at Fairweather downtown say a Relocation Sale is under way. That's usually a polite way of saying they're shutting the place down.
The store manager, however, admits she's just not sure. "We got a sign package, and we were told to put it up."
But no one has told her what's happening when. And new merchandise is still arriving.
The Fairweather website had said the women's fashion retailer is as old as Canada itself and that there are 100 stores in 10 provinces.
We phone the chain's Toronto head office but don't hear back. If that downtown store does die, it's significant. It's an original, there since the Eaton Centre opened.
There are precious few national stores -- La Senza, Le Chateau -- left in the mall today. Now called the Hamilton City Centre, it's mostly home to wing-and-a-prayer discount retailers.
There's Home Surplus -- Your Liquidation Department Store, where the featured item by the entrance is one dramatically dented fridge for $999. Down the corridor, at Shoe Plus, there's a closing sale: Everything Must Go.
Hart, a discount department chain from Quebec, arrived a couple of years ago and is trying hard. But it is a junior Zellers at best.
Perhaps there are too many of us who remember Eaton's.
Twenty years ago this spring they opened the new Eaton's. It was the size of two Home Depots, on four levels. It was designed to be a step up, a smart place -- just the way a downtown flagship store should be.
The adjoining Eaton Centre mall opened the next year, in the midst of a recession, and with Hamilton trying to recover from a brutal strike at Stelco.
And it was competing for tenants with Burlington's brand-new Mapleview Mall. The Eaton Centre opened with only a third of its 116-storefronts occupied.
Eaton's filed for bankruptcy protection 10 years ago, and the mall has struggled ever since.
In the fall of 2007, more than 400 city workers moved there while renovations take place at City Hall. That boost has helped, but it hasn't turned the place around.
And when those city workers go back to Main West at the end of next year? It won't be pretty.
Whatever's to be done? Let's go to the Centre's food court and try to think this one through.
Greek Cuisine has shut down, and a Mexican place, too. But we get the curried chicken at the Caribbean Pot, and it's good.
The woman behind the counter says business is decent some days and other days "this is the dead zone."
Just as we're finishing up, along comes Terry Cooke, Hamilton-Wentworth regional chair 1994- 2000, a man with ideas on everything.
We ask what's to be done with this place. Cooke looks around and says it's clear we don't need all this retail space.
Then he tells a story from late in his regional-chair days. He describes a talk with Emile Mashaal, owner of Jackson Square, who offered to buy the troubled Eaton Centre and turn it over to McMaster for free.
Mashaal, based in Montreal, knew the powers of having higher education downtown. There the sidewalks are alive with the students of McGill, Concordia, Dawson, College de Montreal, Universite du Quebec.
Cooke says they couldn't sell Mac on the mall. Instead, he says, the university decided "we'll put our toe in the water," by locating the continuing ed department in the old courthouse at Main and John, which Mac leases for a token amount.
McMaster is to build a new campus in Burlington. But Cooke thinks the university should have a more significant presence in the core of the city that's been home for nearly 80 years.
And he figures the old Eaton Centre would be just the place. But Cooke says that won't happen with a mall owner knocking on a university president's door.
"It can't be some developer going cap in hand. It has to be an initiative championed by McMaster and the city. These things only happen from the top down."
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