This week’s Stroll column in Eye Weekly took us to Yorkdale Mall. While not a true public space, it’s a major public-private place in Toronto where hundreds of thousands of people go each week. I’ve had a soft spot for it since my first visit in 1985 when it was as close to downtown Toronto as we were allowed to get on a trip up the 401 to the GTA that summer. I remember in particular being in awe of the Simpsons Court, and how the escalators in the department stores kept zigzagging upwards, far higher than our less futuristic mall in Windsor. Even today it’s as close to “the city” as the parents of many GTA and hinterland expat friends want to get, and will drop them off at Yorkdale to avoid the drive into the core(s). What is interesting about Yorkdale is the strata of people it attracts, but also its importance in Toronto’s modern concrete development:
…Yorkdale is doubly special because it also helped vault Toronto into the Modern Age when it opened in 1964, before even new City Hall. It was the first of its kind in Canada and the largest indoor mall in the world for a time. With Eaton’s, Simpson’s and Dominion as anchors, Yorkdale was an Emerald City on the fringe of Toronto, designed by John Graham and Company, the Seattle architecture firm who did the Space Needle (and two generations earlier, the Ford factory and showroom that still stands at Dupont and Ossington).
Adam Sobolak, an activist in Toronto’s growing modern preservation movement, speaks in glowing terms of what some see as just a mall: “Yorkdale always seemed more ample and luxurious than the usual Graham fare … what intrigues me is, from photographic evidence, how astonishingly Kennedy-era suave, stylish and timelessly fresh their graphics and accoutrements were.†Sobolak points out that the interchange of the 401 and the Allen Expressway that fed into Yorkdale’s 7,000-car lot was called, in the space-age parlance of the day, a “turbochange.â€
While malls helped propel suburban development in post-war Toronto, they didn’t kill all downtown or street level retail life as they did in other cities, like in Windsor, or in many American cities. Toronto continues to thrive in many areas, but if there is a victim of Yorkdale’s success it would be Weston Road which has never recovered from having its customer base sucked away, and as I heard at a meeting at Weston’s UrbanArts on Monday night, people still lament Yorkdale’s effect on the area.
As it is now (as of 1978) connected to the Spadina subway line, Yorkdale fits into my mental model of Toronto’s electric and walkable circulatory system, unlike places like Sherway Gardens in Etobicoke that are “off the map” because they aren’t connected to something “rail based” (in this sense, Scarborough Town Centre is also part of this map thanks to the SRT). At one point a couple weeks ago my mall rat accomplice and I spent 6 hours wandering Yorkdale in preparation for this article. Not since working at a lowly mall record store during undergrad and grad school have I spent so much time in a mall, watching it change throughout the day as different crowds rolled through. We also walked around the wasteland surrounding some sides of the mall. In their fine book Toronto Observed: Its Architecture, Patrons and History William Dendy and William Kilbourn wrote of the “mutilated landscape” both motorists and subway passengers pass through by Yorkdale — quite something to walk through and explore, and then retreat back into Yorkdale’s modern comforts.
4 comments
A number of years ago, I ghostwrote a book for the man who supervised the development of Yorkdale as CEO of Triton Centres Limited, the development art of Trizec*, a company controlled by English investors. David Philpott (now dead) said that it was the only project of his career that he could call a “triumph” without blushing. “Yorkdale is not an exceptional development by today’s standards,” he said, “but in 1960, we were pioneers; this was to be the largest retail project in the world.After almost five years of intensive negotiations, government obstruction, rejection by banks, design and construction difficulties and resistance from retailers, it emerged as the most innnovative commercial real estate project in North America.”
*Trizec (for trivia buffs) stood for three partners “Tri”, “Z” for William Zeckendorf, the developer,”E” for Eagle Star Insurance of London, and “C” for Covent Garden Properties Limited of London (the latter two the controlling investors).
DB> Indeed — I found many bits of praise for Trizec co. here and there. They cared, it seems, about both the details and their grand vision.
If you go outside the Indigo/Rainforest Cafe “north” exit, there is an original 1964 statue called “Triton” by Graham Coughtey with a plaque reading “Commissioned by the officers of Trizec corp ltd and dedicated to the employees and advisor’s of the Triton Centres Ltd whose talents and energies made Yorkdale Shopping Centre a reality”. There are a couple of knighted fellows listed too…but now you’ve explained the British connection. Thanks.
The statue used to be inside the mall, in an oval fountain, but is now in the parking lot. Out with the old! (sigh)
David Philpott said that his children would go to the statue (when it was inside), point to the brass plaque and say “That’s where Daddy’s buried.” Philpott, I understand, insisted that some money be spent on some public art for the project, something that had not been considered before.
Ah, so *that’s* where Triton went. (Used to be in front of Eaton’s.)
Of course, the whole Triton/Trizec/Yorkdale thing begs to be viewed alongside other Zeckendorf projects of the date, including Place Ville Marie in Montreal–which, in terms of innovative design and planning, serves as something of an Canadian urban pendant to suburban Yorkdale…