{"id":2173,"date":"2007-08-09T13:22:23","date_gmt":"2007-08-09T17:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=2173"},"modified":"2013-01-21T14:52:38","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T19:52:38","slug":"stroll-yorkdale-mall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2007\/08\/09\/stroll-yorkdale-mall\/","title":{"rendered":"Stroll: Yorkdale Mall"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s Stroll column in Eye Weekly<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

…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). <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Adam Sobolak, an activist in Toronto’s growing modern preservation movement, speaks in glowing terms of what some see as just a mall: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yorkdale 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.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153turbochange.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> on Monday night, people still lament Yorkdale’s effect on the area.<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>William Dendy and William Kilbourn<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 TorontoContinue reading “Stroll: Yorkdale Mall”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22,24,20,6],"tags":[1910,6458,457,244,1804,423,1174,6457,6462,6460,22085,41,3818,430,6459,6463,19,625,2665,6461,853,1216],"class_list":["post-2173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-history","category-urban-design","category-walking","tag-adam-sobolak","tag-allen-expressway","tag-canada","tag-dupont","tag-eaton","tag-eye-weekly","tag-ford","tag-ford-factory","tag-history-william-dendy","tag-john-graham","tag-politics","tag-psychogeography","tag-scarborough-town-centre","tag-seattle","tag-simpsons-court","tag-street-level-retail-life","tag-toronto","tag-us-federal-reserve","tag-weston","tag-william-kilbourn","tag-windsor","tag-yorkdale-mall"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStroll: Yorkdale Mall - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2007\/08\/09\/stroll-yorkdale-mall\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Stroll: Yorkdale Mall - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This week’s Stroll column in Eye Weekly took us to Yorkdale Mall. 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