June 30th, 2009
Sometimes this curved street seems to capture the imagination.
Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local …
June 30th, 2009
In November, 1954, Ontario’s first regional shopping centre opened in East Hamilton - the Greater Hamilton Shopping Centre, or better known as Centre Mall. While other outdoor plazas opened earlier - Sunnybrook Plaza was Toronto’s first, built several years earlier - Centre Mall was the first mall with traditional anchor department stores surrounded by free parking in Canada. Don Mills Town Centre, the first mall with a suburban Eaton’s store, was still a year away when the first Sears store in Canada opened, the first phase of the massive project. Now, it is being replaced by a boring, suburban big-box development.
Centre Mall, like Toronto’s Dufferin Mall, was built in an urban neighbourhood on the site of a former racetrack. By 1957, the opening of Morgan’s, the Montreal-based department store, completed the 100-plus store mall that also included a cinema (later, a bingo hall). A renovation in the late 1960s enclosed the mall, with a later expansion including a food court and a K-Mart store on the north side.
Centre Mall changed the Ontario retail landscape forever. Downtown Hamilton, only a 15 minute drive or less than a half hour on the Barton trolleybus, was the dominant retail centre, and had several major department stores, including Eaton’s. Other malls quickly followed across the province - but the next major innovation was Yorkdale, the first enclosed regional mall, which opened in 1960.
By the 1960s, the decline of Downtown Hamilton had the city leadership look to extreme urban renewal as the answer to its woes. A dozen city blocks were cleared for, amongst other things, a new city hall, a shopping mall (Jackson Square), convention hall and cultural centre. Later additions included Copps Colliseum and a new Eaton Centre in the 1980s, but today, that downtown mall is one of the best of a sad lot of downtown Eaton-anchored malls in smaller Ontario cities, and every department store closed by the 1997, when Eaton’s shut down.
Inside Centre Mall, July 2008.
June 29th, 2009
Well, so much for the National Transit Strategy.
When city council approved the additional $417 million for the streetcar purchase on …
June 29th, 2009
Each Monday, we bring you some of the popular posts from our sister blog, Spacing Montreal. We’ll keep an eye open for topics and discussions that are pertinent …
June 28th, 2009
Moonwalkers from Sam Javanrouh on Vimeo.
When Michael Jackson’s death was announced, I never gave any thought to the possibility that Spacing would somehow be …
June 27th, 2009
Just three days into this year’s Bike Month, a damp May 28th was host to Bike Summit 2009, a day-long conference on cycling policy co-hosted by the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation (TCAT) …
June 27th, 2009
Quaint wires hovering above Dundas St. West provide a tranquil moment.
Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of …
June 27th, 2009
One of the few pieces of cycling infrastructure that the City of Toronto has introduced in the past decade are white dots painted at semi-actuated intersections, so that cyclists know
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