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  #21  
Old Posted Jul 10, 2016, 2:38 PM
visualman57 visualman57 is offline
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Originally Posted by Keith P. View Post
Possibly so. I have no recollection of the place. I wonder if they ever sold the giraffe?
I believe that Woozles bought it when the Doll's House closed up in Barrington Place.
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  #22  
Old Posted Jul 10, 2016, 2:57 PM
fenwick16 fenwick16 is offline
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I worked at Scotia Square during the early 70's during the summer months. Was the food court and Dick Turpin's Pub in the Village Square?

Does any of the Village Square wood decor still exist?
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  #23  
Old Posted Jul 10, 2016, 3:17 PM
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That text only design is copied from Place Ville Marie in mtl. Also, the TD centre picked up on it and gave it a Mies feel. Scotia sq was only a couple of years younger than that. Underground malls were the rage so they gave SS an underground feel even tho it was high above Barrington St.
Vancouver's Pacific Centre, in the early years when the mall portion was just a small extension of the basement level of Eaton's, used only monochrome for the store signage, although logos were allowed. Pacific Centre followed the Mies look to a degree as well.

I remember the generic fonts in Scotia Square very well as a kid, the mall looked very clean and organized. My mom used to buy most of my clothes as Kid's Stuff / Seven and Up. The Village Square changed that but it was also a much needed as the generic look was getting a bit stale by then.

My mom worked at the Arcade Ladies Shop at the entrance to The Village Square, I remember meeting her at lunch by the huge fountain in the centre court outside Zumburger.
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  #24  
Old Posted Jul 10, 2016, 3:19 PM
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Originally Posted by fenwick16 View Post
I worked at Scotia Square during the early 70's during the summer months. Was the food court and Dick Turpin's Pub in the Village Square?

Does any of the Village Square wood decor still exist?
I remember the original 'Food Court' of the Village Square had only Dairy Queen and KFC in the 70's.
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  #25  
Old Posted Jul 10, 2016, 8:41 PM
terrynorthend terrynorthend is offline
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Originally Posted by fenwick16 View Post
I worked at Scotia Square during the early 70's during the summer months. Was the food court and Dick Turpin's Pub in the Village Square?

Does any of the Village Square wood decor still exist?
Not at SS anymore. I was looking through the Vintage Halifax page on Facebook. Highly recommend. Remember the NSL&P Christmas Show or Joe's Diner and I Scream M.Porium with the pop-cooler in the trunk?



Image courtesy Vintage Halifax
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  #26  
Old Posted Jul 10, 2016, 10:54 PM
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Interesting to me, I have no recollection of Joe's Diner whatsoever. Was it upstairs or in the lower level? Roughly where was it located? I am guessing it must not have been around all that long.
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  #27  
Old Posted Jul 10, 2016, 11:23 PM
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Originally Posted by Keith P. View Post
Interesting to me, I have no recollection of Joe's Diner whatsoever. Was it upstairs or in the lower level? Roughly where was it located? I am guessing it must not have been around all that long.
Looks like it might be where ScotiaBank is now.
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  #28  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 1:08 AM
terrynorthend terrynorthend is offline
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Originally Posted by Keith P. View Post
Interesting to me, I have no recollection of Joe's Diner whatsoever. Was it upstairs or in the lower level? Roughly where was it located? I am guessing it must not have been around all that long.
I only remember it from a few shopping expeditions away from my family's normal Dartmouth haunts (Mic Mac, Penhorn, Woodlawn and K-Mart Malls) as a youngster. I think it was second level, but it could have been first level. It was definitely near "centre court", although I am having a hard time trying to visualize how it fits in relative to the fountain (which is gone now, but may not have even been there originally.) It seems like it was right around where the fountain was or just above it on the second floor.

With all the changes and conversion to office space, I have trouble imagining what the original layout of the first level was. I have a pretty good memory of the extent of the second level, and how the cinemas, Woolco and the smaller boutique shops related. The food court was downstairs, kiosks wrapped around a central hub, closer to the Barrington Street wall. Down that main path that now leads from Tim Hortons towards the NSLC, the food court was on the right (east) side and the grocery store and old NSLC were on the left (west) side.

Most of these memories however are from my visits in the mid-80's and onward when I was in high school+. Joe's Diner was gone by then and I believe the mall had changed substantially since I had been visiting as a kid in the 70's

EDIT: I just looked at the photo again, and I guess that is the fountain in the foreground. Assuming it was in roughly the same place as it was most recently then Green Bastard is probably right. Just about where Scotiabank is, although I think Joe's Diner was stand-alone, ie. you could walk all the way around it, rather than a storefront like Scotiabank is now.

Last edited by terrynorthend; Jul 11, 2016 at 1:21 AM. Reason: I'm not very observant
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  #29  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 10:36 AM
OldDartmouthMark OldDartmouthMark is offline
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Great pic of Joe's Diner. To the best of my recollection, Joe's Diner was where Scotiabank is now, and it was there in the early 1980s. I specifically recall that the '57 Chevy in the diner was only half a car, cut right down the center, and the open side contained a salad bar.

My main stop in the mall was Martime Hobbies and Crafts - upstairs, I believe. I vaguely remember that the mall had been remodelled sometime during the early '80s. I'm having trouble visualizing the exact layout, though it may be just that I didn't spend that much time there since I lived in Dartmouth (went to Mic Mac and Penhorn much more). The mall has changed so much over the years that it is difficult remembering its original configuration without extensive visual references.

I appreciate all the comments from those who remember it well - it brings back a lot of memories.
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  #30  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 12:09 PM
IanWatson IanWatson is offline
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Originally Posted by Keith P. View Post
Possibly so. I have no recollection of the place. I wonder if they ever sold the giraffe?
Oh jeez I remember that giraffe! Am I crazy in thinking it eventually ended up in the kids section of the Spring Garden Memorial Library, or did they have a different one?
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  #31  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 1:14 PM
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Oh jeez I remember that giraffe! Am I crazy in thinking it eventually ended up in the kids section of the Spring Garden Memorial Library, or did they have a different one?
Not crazy: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-s...home-1.2707178
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  #32  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 2:50 PM
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Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark View Post
Great pic of Joe's Diner. To the best of my recollection, Joe's Diner was where Scotiabank is now, and it was there in the early 1980s. I specifically recall that the '57 Chevy in the diner was only half a car, cut right down the center, and the open side contained a salad bar.

My main stop in the mall was Martime Hobbies and Crafts - upstairs, I believe. I vaguely remember that the mall had been remodelled sometime during the early '80s. I'm having trouble visualizing the exact layout, though it may be just that I didn't spend that much time there since I lived in Dartmouth (went to Mic Mac and Penhorn much more). The mall has changed so much over the years that it is difficult remembering its original configuration without extensive visual references.

I appreciate all the comments from those who remember it well - it brings back a lot of memories.
Yeah I have a vivid memory of that car! My dad used to come to Halifax for radiology conference and we used to tag along, and I remember always wanting to go with my mom to the restaurant with the car!
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  #33  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 3:10 PM
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Oh jeez I remember that giraffe! Am I crazy in thinking it eventually ended up in the kids section of the Spring Garden Memorial Library, or did they have a different one?
Apparently, Queen Judith acquired it to be part of her Royal Zoological Collection.
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  #34  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 5:58 PM
counterfactual counterfactual is offline
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Originally Posted by ns_kid View Post
Great photo. I'd also love to see an interior view. I remember Cinema Scotia Square as a very comfortable, classy theatre, with fine acoustics. Of course when built it was to replace the late, lamented Capitol, a reduction from 2000 seats to almost 800. Still a large auditorium by today's standards. (The Oxford has 340 seats; the largest auditorium at Bayers Lake has 336.)

For its first couple of decades Scotia Square had two levels with quite diverse retail and entertainment choices. As a kid I loved shopping for models and trains at the large Maritime Hobbies store on the upper mall.

One unique design feature was that the standard store front had generic text-based signs to identify the tenant: no logos or designer fonts were allowed. I guess it was meant to convey an elegant, homogeneous appearance but it may ultimately have helped to discourage traffic.

I'm still somewhat surprised that the downtown retail environment could fail so dramatically over the span of a few decades.
Once City and Provincial Governments prioritized the automobile and suburbs, and developed roads/cities around them, urban malls not properly served by public transit would never survive, and still today struggle.

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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  #35  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 6:14 PM
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Originally Posted by counterfactual View Post
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.
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.

Last edited by someone123; Jul 11, 2016 at 6:24 PM.
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  #36  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 6:42 PM
OldDartmouthMark OldDartmouthMark is offline
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Originally Posted by someone123 View Post
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.
Halifax never had a Hudson's Bay Store until the early 1980's (IIRC), after Hudson's Bay bought out Simpson's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpso...artment_store)

However, as mentioned there was already an established shopping district in Halifax, with Barrington Street having Zeller's (the old Discovery Centre building), Eaton's (the NS government building next to The Roy), Metropolitan store further up, etc. Then there was the huge (for the time) Simpson's store out by the Armdale Rotary. As mentioned, Scotia Square got Woolco dept. store at some point. One by one, the above mentioned stores moved to more suburban mall locations as shopping trends shifted.

The only Hudson's Bay locations in the Halifax area were the former Simpson's location Mic Mac Mall in Dartmouth and in West End Mall in Halifax where the CBC currently resides. Can't remember which one opened first, but I'm thinking it was Mic Mac. Mic Mac is the only one that remains.
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  #37  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 6:50 PM
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The only Hudson's Bay locations in the Halifax area were the former Simpson's location Mic Mac Mall in Dartmouth and in West End Mall in Halifax where the CBC currently resides. Can't remember which one opened first, but I'm thinking it was Mic Mac. Mic Mac is the only one that remains.
My impression is that the Bay managed to survive because it is a little more upscale, whereas places like Eaton's and Woolco had more price-sensitive customers and were hurt a lot more by Wal-Mart and other big box stores.
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  #38  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 7:09 PM
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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.
Well, Scotia Square is the downtown transit hub for Metro Transit. It is usually overrun with buses. The problem is that Metro Transit is not very good, is seen as a system of last resort by many, and does not serve nearly the same percentage of daily travelers as the TTC.

As Someone123 said, Eaton Centre in Toronto is a much more welcoming space from street level than SS. Plus it is built on level ground, unlike SS which is poorly designed for any sort of pedestrian access - essentially inaccessible from Barrington, the main mall entrance a small almost invisible area on the side of a steep hill, the backside entrance on Abermarle buried deep into a spooky plaza, and no north side entrance whatsoever. It would be hard to design worse access in reality.

That being said, it was competing at the time of its opening with some very successful shopping centers such as HSC, the Bayers Road Shopping Center, Simpsons, and Penhorn and Kmart in Dartmouth. MicMac opened just a few years later. Tough to compete in a culture where many citizens looked askance at parking garages, and even fewer were willing to pay for parking.
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  #39  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 7:52 PM
OldDartmouthMark OldDartmouthMark is offline
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To add to the discussion, here's an excerpt from Eaton's on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eaton%27s#Decline

I hadn't known about multiple Eaton Centres before. Very interesting.

Quote:
Decline
Unsuccessful expansion

In the 1970s, Eaton's tried to expand its reach in Canadian retailing by opening a chain of discount or "junior" department stores called Horizon. The Horizon chain was closed in 1978. Three of its stores were converted to Eaton's stores, and the others were permanently closed.

In the 1970s and 1980s, through the provincial government's Ontario Downtown Renewal Programme, Eaton's was a partner in the development of downtown malls in smaller cities, intended to foster the revitalization of urban cores. As the chain formed the anchor of many of these shopping centres, these often carried the "Eaton Centre" name. Nearly all these malls — in cities such as Sarnia, Brantford, Guelph and Peterborough — had high vacancy rates and poor patronage, and contributed to the store's financial problems.[6]

Suburban competition

The economic recession of the early 1980s hurt the company. The Hudson's Bay Company, Sears Canada, and Zellers all took market share from Eaton's. By the 1990s, American retailers, most notably Walmart, were expanding into Canada, and Eaton's found it increasingly difficult to compete.

Retailing and land use trends in the last decades of the 20th century did not favour Eaton's. Traditional department stores, including Eaton's, commanded an ever-shrinking share of the Canadian retail dollar, as big box stores, such as Wal-Mart and Zellers, and specialty stores expanded their shares of retail sales. With the advent of urban sprawl, most Canadian downtown shopping districts (which were historically dominated by Eaton's) had to increasingly share retail sales with growing suburban shopping areas, where Eaton's was just one of many competitors.

Family management

Eaton's difficulties were not all caused by external forces. Poor management by the last two generations of Eaton family members to run the chain contributed to the demise of Eaton's. Stores that once served as landmarks in their communities were not renovated. New Eaton's stores built since the 1960s were largely indistinguishable from other chain stores, further reducing Eaton's status as a destination store.

The end of the catalogue and of the Eaton's Santa Claus parades, though being cost-saving measures, ensured Eaton's no longer held the same place in Canadians' hearts.

The chain that had touted itself in the 1940s and 1950s as "The Store for Young Canada" lost touch with younger customers, and unintentionally became known as a chain that catered to older shoppers. Once known for its superior customer service (with its staff proudly known as "Eatonians"), Eaton's began to cut back on sales staff and training in an effort to trim costs. A chain that had once prided itself on its buying offices throughout the globe and on the unique and diverse goods that it offered its customers had, by the latter half of the twentieth century, an antiquated supply chain and a haphazard and confused approach to merchandising.

In one particularly disastrous move, Eaton’s moved to an "Everyday Value Pricing" strategy (also known as "Eaton Value") in 1991, which meant that all discounts and sales, including Eaton’s famous Trans-Canada Sale, were eliminated. The strategy quickly drove away customers, but was continued for four years before it was abandoned.

In 1997, seeing the success of The Bay in higher-end retailing, Eaton's lured their chief executive George Kosich over to try to duplicate the strategy. The Hudson's Bay Company filed a lawsuit saying that Kosich had violated his employment contract. Eaton's had also sued HBC for poaching several of its executives. Aside from that controversy, the new retailing strategy was not only unsuccessful, it also gave rival Sears Canada the opportunity to move up to the market segment long dominated by Eaton's. Kosich resigned in 1998 and was replaced by chairman Brent Ballantyne.[7]
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  #40  
Old Posted Jul 11, 2016, 8:04 PM
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Well, Scotia Square is the downtown transit hub for Metro Transit. It is usually overrun with buses. The problem is that Metro Transit is not very good, is seen as a system of last resort by many, and does not serve nearly the same percentage of daily travelers as the TTC.
The Scotia Square terminal is truly awful. It has no amenities, it is not intermodal, it's unpleasant and ugly, and there is nothing convenient near where the buses stop. It is crazy that Halifax has a giant concrete bunker that covers many blocks but the buses are outside along Barrington and rail doesn't even come downtown. Of course many of the transit routes themselves don't meaningfully relate to each other either.

A real version of Scotia Square would be a sheltered or indoor (i.e. comfortable year-round) bus loop surrounded by shop fronts plus ferry terminal and ideally rail (could be VIA and commuter rail with underground connections to both north and south rail lines).

In the Vancouver area developers and the transit authority are just starting to get this right. This article is from 2005; the transit hub and mall are all up and running now and have turned out to be very successful: http://www.6717000.com/blog/2005/10/...w-westminster/
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