{"id":59276,"date":"2018-09-26T02:00:24","date_gmt":"2018-09-26T06:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=59276"},"modified":"2018-09-26T12:24:54","modified_gmt":"2018-09-26T16:24:54","slug":"why-im-making-a-book-about-the-galleria-mall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2018\/09\/26\/why-im-making-a-book-about-the-galleria-mall\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I’m making a book about the Galleria Mall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shari Kasman is a long-time contributor to Spacing. We will be selling her book in the Spacing Store<\/a> when it’s published this fall.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Support her Kickstarter campaign<\/a> to get the book printed<\/h3>\n
\n

Galleria Mall in Toronto\u2019s west end is notorious for its stuck-in-the-past aesthetic. It was built in 1972, and has served the neighbourhood ever since. Sadly, operations there are winding to a halt as the property was sold to developers a few years back. Although the mall still stands, the arcade games have recently disappeared, the El Amigo food counter has closed, and independent stores have either shut down or relocated. The mall will be around for a while longer, though, as the chain stores, like the grocery and liquor stores, will continue to function until the day a bulldozer smashes through the mall\u2019s brick facade. So, to memorialize the mall I\u2019m making a book filled with captioned photographs of Galleria Mall and relevant shopping mall information.<\/p>\n

Although I\u2019ve spent most of my life in Toronto, I didn\u2019t visit the Galleria until a decade ago, when I moved close by. It was a convenient place to do banking and buy wine, but also, it became a place where I\u2019d go to temporarily transport myself to another era. Beforehand, I\u2019d almost forgotten what rotary-dial phones looked like. I was amazed how the mall managed to stay so true to its origins when in most other instances, new tiles or chrome detailing have entered the picture. Even the Galleria\u2019s little cousin, Crossways, at Bloor and Dundas West, has had a makeover, though in that case it\u2019s as if it\u2019s just wearing a silly wig\u2014you can still see its \u201870s-era charm peeking through.<\/p>\n

There are malls in various states of neglect and\/or disrepair worldwide, and the retail apocalypse has recently sent malls in a downward spiral, especially south of the border. Whereas some malls empty out and have zero foot traffic, the Galleria is far from useless. Yes, it\u2019s been a place to pick up frozen pizza and a digital watch, but it\u2019s also functioned as a quality second living room for many community members, especially older Portuguese men. Plus, there have been annual parking lot carnivals and celebrations for holidays that have included magic shows and accordion music.<\/p>\n

A little over five years ago I began to capture the essence of this special place since I was captivated by its aesthetic and knew it would be plowed down soon enough. Within a one-year period, July 2013 to 2014, I took hundreds of pictures in and around the mall. These photographs focus on the mall\u2019s structure, design, and festivities. I was curious as to how the mall wound up as is, which led to my fascination with malls in general, and so I borrowed all the library\u2019s shopping-mall books.<\/p>\n

Over the past five years, while working on this book project, I\u2019ve been sidetracked by a number of art and writing projects, but still had the Galleria book on my list of things to do. In the meantime, I made smaller mall items that were easier to produce, like Galleria postcards\u2014I\u2019d seen Toronto postcards with the CN Tower or Casa Loma on the front and I thought sending a postcard with a picture from the depths of the Galleria would be a good alternative. I later led a few Jane\u2019s Walks at the mall, each with a slightly different focus, covering topics that included the history of the site and the mall, the present and future of the Galleria, and parking lot problems.<\/p>\n

Although the Galleria has always been important to the surrounding community, it\u2019s an underperforming mall that has faced troubles as far back as the ’80s. Issues with finding retailers and keeping clientele have persisted until the end. There were many times over the years when forward-thinking plans were developed to create positive change at the mall. There were proposed design improvements and plans to add residential space in the \u201880s and mixed-use development proposals in the \u201800s. These plans either wound up in filing cabinets or framed and hung on the walls of the management office.<\/p>\n

Actually, a couple of years ago, I found framed drawings. Two of them seemed to show options for the original interior design scheme, complete with colour chips indicating the mall\u2019s colour palette. Then there was a rendering that included skylights and a carousel and another with fluorescent banners. I recently tracked down the designer who was hired in the \u201880s to rejuvenate the mall. He\u2019d even proposed installing an indoor playground. Unfortunately, the mall owners didn\u2019t follow through with the plans to align the Galleria with the original intention of the mall: a venue for shopping, socializing, and entertainment where the interior mimicked the outdoor world, with natural light streaming into a plant-filled space, with a fountain in a central area, beneath skylights. I was curious about the building\u2019s design and coincidentally, a friend had dug up the plans when his architectural firm was working on a related project. In looking at the drawings, I saw that every single brick was intentional. It was constructed entirely antithetical to the original vision of how a mall should be. This one-storey urban mall was not an accident.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, the recent disappearance of stores and food options hasn\u2019t affected the community-centre nature of the mall. It remains a free, climate-controlled space where friends gather and can stay as long as they\u2019d like, as long as the mall\u2019s open. There are even free copies of a Portuguese newspaper.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s 100+ captioned photos include some of my favourite moments at the mall, including the snake show at Christmas. The mall was busy enough that there were more people than snakes at the event, and Santa Claus was there, watching the security guards pose with those crawling creatures. There are pictures of storefronts and the Hallowe\u2019en display complete with a blow-up vampire in a coffin. Captions offer insight into all things Galleria, one person\u2019s view of a local time capsule.  <\/p>\n

The mall was finally sold in 2015 and discussions about the future of the site began not long after. Because of my interest in the Galleria, I was involved in the consultation meetings with urban planners, developers, City staff, a transit planner, architect, landscape architect, perhaps a couple of other people in suits, and a few members of the community. This provided insight into future plans, but there was no interest in recreating a \u201870s-era time capsule in the lobby of any of the new buildings. I\u2019m sure none of their eight towers will include the Galleria\u2019s colour scheme, but maybe they can install pot lights that shine green light throughout the corridors as a tribute to the mall.<\/p>\n

My book is informative and topical, humourous and a little sad, and an honest portrait of an urban mall that\u2019s always been useful, but in terms of appearance, never quite made it past the \u201870s. It hasn\u2019t been the most popular of malls, but it\u2019s a mall that\u2019s been there for the community, stranded within an underused parking-lot ocean this whole time. My hope with the book is to preserve memories of this iconic Toronto shopping mall while placing it in the context of the global shopping mall situation, as well as providing insight into decisions made along the way that ensured the mall\u2019s retro aesthetic would persist into the 21st century, right up until the mall\u2019s final days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shari Kasman is a long-time contributor to Spacing. We will be selling her book in the Spacing Store when it’s published this fall. Support her Kickstarter campaign to get the book printed Galleria Mall in Toronto\u2019s west end is notorious for its stuck-in-the-past aesthetic. It was built in 1972, and has served the neighbourhood everContinue reading “Why I’m making a book about the Galleria Mall”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8388,"featured_media":59277,"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":[21758],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy I'm making a book about the Galleria 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\/2018\/09\/26\/why-im-making-a-book-about-the-galleria-mall\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why I'm making a book about the Galleria Mall - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Shari Kasman is a long-time contributor to Spacing. 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