MEMORABLE MOMENTS IN ONTARIO RETAILING
© John Winter Associates Limited
Two Wheeler Avenue, Suite 201
Toronto, ON, M4L 3V2
416-691-1870, fax: 416-694-6258
THE SIXTIES
Turning
Point: February 1964
Highlights:
Fairview, Wellington Square, The Colonade, Yorkdale.
1960 Ontario had
six million people and 114 shopping centres.
1960 Fairview Mall, St. Catharines, opens. It only took
four years for the suburban idea to reach Ontario, from the opening of Victor
Gruen's first enclosed suburban shopping centre, Southdale Mall, Edina, MN.
Enclosure proves to be very popular: Ontarians did not have to zip up their
parkas nor mop their brows while shopping. In comparison, according to the
traditional viewpoint, it took about 30 years from the first strip centre
(Country Club Plaza, 1923, Kansas City or from the first one-landlord, interior
courtyard of Highland Park, Dallas, 1931) for the strip mall concept to reach
Ontario (Sunnybrook Plaza, Eglinton and Bayview, 1952). Other strip centres
appear at Applewood Acres, Crang Plaza (later Sheridan Mall) and the Golden
Mile. They were slow to arrive; but once Ontarians tried 'em, they liked 'em.
Malls and plazas became dominant in one mercurial generation.
ThatÕs the traditional story: but thereÕs something strange
about it. Why would Canadians wait so long for a good mall? The demand was
there: people needed goods, and automobiles were being used to access them. Why
not provide some parking in front of the stores? While the Guinness Book of World Records identifies Baltimore and 1905 as the
first North American mall, Metro Toronto Planning lists a number of malls in
Toronto before Sunnybrook in 1952. There was of course St. Lawrence Market
(1855), enclosed and accessible. The Royal York Hotel and Union Station, both
opened in 1931, had enclosed shopping. There was an enclosed commercial court
on lower Spadina in 1909.
(I think that Edward BoultonÕs facility at Roland and
Uplands in Baltimore should not count, since the off-street parking area was
designed for horses and carriages. I would also not count Professor McCabeÕs
last published article (Plan Canada,
Sept. 1979), which identifies the first Roman mall, complete with an area to
park the chariots. The common area maintenance charges must have been a tad
high every time Vesuvious erupted, and the continuous operations clauses must
also have been difficult to enforce).
Between 1918 and 1922, Metro Toronto Planning reports seven
shopping centres built earlier than Kansas CityÕs Country Club Plaza: five in
York (Weston Road, Bathurst Street and John Street), one in Toronto (Bloor
Street West) and one in the east (Old Kingston Road and the Military Trail).
Each strip centre had parking and an average of nine stores. Bloor Street West
and Keele Street, serving High Park, was redeveloped as four storey apartments.
1500 Bathurst Street (at St. Clair) was redeveloped as high-rise apartments
with ground-floor retail, a continuous retail use. Weston Road just south of
Eglinton, and Kingston and Military Trail, survive today, though they have been
considerably re-developed. Perhaps none of the original buildings survive, but
certainly suburban retail uses have persisted in the same locations longer than
Kansas City.
Besides being enclosed and in a suburban area, Fairview Mall
in St. Catharines is also the first ÒmodernÓ shopping centre because it is the
first to be located beside an expressway, The Queen Elizabeth Way (1931,
dedicated in 1939). Compared to Southdown, however, Fairview was much smaller,
and of only one floor.
1960 North America's first enclosed, climate-controlled
downtown shopping centre opens in London, Wellington Square, 400,000 square
feet developed by Campeau, anchored by a five level Eaton's and a Woolworths.
Rooftop parking provided 330 spaces (click here for plan). The City considers building an expressway up the
environmentally-sensitive Thames Valley to better serve these downtown
merchants.
1960 Cedarbrae
opens in Scarborough developed by Fairview Corporation. It is anchored two
years later by Simpson's, its first
venture outside any downtown (Toronto, Montreal, London, Halifax and Regina).
John Bousfield is Planning Director of Scarborough. He laid out the wonderful
arterial grid that keeps through traffic out of residential neighbourhoods.
"You can imagine for Scarborough, that was the biggest deal, because that
was Scarborough's first department store. I was the Planning Director then. We
were so proud that somebody like Simpson's
would come to Scarborough" (Report
on Business, July 1992).
Cedarbrae, Fairview and the other malls are developed by
CadillacÕs "ten percenters", who get expenses but no pay,
"only" a ten percent equity share when the mall is operating.
Cedarbrae's original mortgage was $1.8
million. As no real estate company owns anything free and clear, it was
re-mortgaged for a first time in 1983 for $14.8 million.
1960 TowerÕs first department store
opens at Lawrence and Midland. Each selling department is operated as a
licensed concession. The pharmacist lessee was Kest Drugs Limited, which Towers
purchases in 1968.
1960 The OÕKeefe
Centre opens in October with Julie Andrews, Richard Burton and Robert
Goulet in Camelot. The OÕKeefe
Brewing Company was prohibited from showing its product (and people enjoying
its product) on television. So it dreamed up this promotion.
1960 Crosstown
Expressway is nixed. Passing through Rosedale on a railway embankment flaws
a really useful alignment.
1960 Famous
Players begins a five year experiment, pay television service in Etobicoke.
With only one Toronto channel in 1960, CFTO, there is not much interest (CBLT
begins in 1961).
1960 Other GTA
centres include Newtonbrook, Riverdale, Richmond Heights, Cavenshore and
Hopedale (Oakville). Other Ontario centres include Lincoln Plaza (Welland),
Georgetown Market Place, Brampton Mall and the Aurora SC; all were
open-concept, all were located on major arterials, none on expressways.
1960 Hudsons Bay
Company buys Morgan's and moves
into eastern Canadian markets.
1961 Shoppers City
East opens in Ottawa and Eastview in Vanier, followed by Shoppers City West
two years later. The former is the first mall to be re-boxed in the 1990s (click here). The GTA gets North Park, Royal York Plaza and Thorncrest
Market Place surrounded by high rises. Barrie, London, Petawawa (near the
military camp), St. Catharines, Sarnia and Waterloo get one mall apiece.
1961 Polsun family
founds Dylex to take advantage of the new shopping centre opportunities.
Remember that only one mall at this time was enclosed.
1961 Jane Jacobs
writes her eloquent book, The Death and
Life of Great American Cities. She views the city, not as an abstract
entity to be understood through mechanical and mathematical models, but as a
living organism that evolves according to the principles of biological systems.
Jacobs then illustrates how the life of the civic organism depends upon certain
physical elements, including short blocks, wide and pleasant sidewalks,
buildings oriented to the street ("eyes on the street"), and
close-grained diversity.
On my first visit to New York to see the WorldÕs Fair, I go
to Hudson Street, Greenwich Village to see if I can make out from the clues in
the book where she lived. Forty years later, Jane says I IDed the right block.
"A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A
deserted city street is apt to be unsafe. But how does this work, really? And
what makes a city street well used or shunned? ... A city street equipped to
handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the presence of
strangers, as the streets of successful city neighbourhoods always do, must
have three main qualities:
1.
"First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and
what is private space. Public space and private spaces cannot ooze into each
other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.
2.
"Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we
might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street
equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and
strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their back or blank
sides on it and leave it blind.
3.
"And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both
to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people
in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers.
Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street.
... Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching
street activity. (page 35)
"The basic requisite for such surveillance is a
substantial quantity of stores and other public places sprinkled along the
sidewalks of a district; enterprises and public places that are used by evening
and night must be among them especially. Stores, bars and restaurants, as the
chief examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk
safety.
A.
"First, they give people—both residents and strangers—concrete
reasons for using the sidewalks on which the enterprises face.
B.
"Second, they draw people along the sidewalks past places which have no
attractions to public use in themselves ... Moreover, there should be many
different kinds of enterprises, to give people reasons for crisscrossing paths.
C.
"Third, storekeepers and other small businessmen are typically strong
proponents of peace and order themselves; ... they are great street watchers
and sidewalk guardians if present in sufficient numbers.
D.
"Fourth, the activity generated by people on errands, or people aiming for
food or drink, is itself an attraction to still other people. (pages 36-37).
Of course, you also need a density that will support walk-in
stores, like Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, in southern Manhattan.
1961 OntarioÕs
first discount supermarket, Food City,
opens in Scarborough, with lower everyday prices, reduced operating and
promotion costs. OshawaÕs Towers-Food
City combination would be welcomed by municipalities throughout the Province
because it did not also include any small stores. It did not include any small
stores because Towers was a
collection of small stores (concessions) under one roof.
1962 The first new
Ontario Bay store opens in Eglinton
Town Square. It has the only Ontario escalator that never operates. The
escalator was not ready for opening day, and then it was discovered that no
customer wanted to take the trouble to park on the roof of the store, only at
the front door. So the escalator was never used. It remained there until a
renovation in the early 1990s. The escalator and the roof-top parking was part
of the learning curve of these new mousetraps, the shopping centres.
1962 Shoppers World
Danforth opens in an old aircraft factory, anchored by Eaton's in its second step outside the security of the downtown. It
draws trade right along Kingston Road, penetrating into Ajax. It reigns supreme
in the eastern metropolis until the opening of a better mousetrap, Scarborough
Town Centre.
1962 The following
cities also get one mall each during 1962: Belleville, Brantford, Mississauga,
St. Catharines and Sault Ste. Marie (Churchill Plaza). Birchmount Plaza, Elaine
Plaza and Guildwood Village open in Scarborough.
1962 Academic
literature begins to register the haemorrhaging of the downtown retail
economy, which is much more serious in the United States: Murphy (1962: Land Studies in Geography, Vol. 24, pp.
525-534), Ullman (1962: Regional Science
Association, Papers and Proceedings, pp. 7-23), Vance and Dacey (1962: Proceedings of the IGU Symposium in Urban
Geography, pp. 485-518), and Homer Hoyt (1964: Land Economics, Vol. 40, pp. 159-268). Howard Green's doctoral
thesis at Harvard had asked the provocative question: What functions will
remain downtown? He concluded Government, and its linked functions
(particularly lawyers), plus newspapers, are the only activities that really
need such centrality.
Dr. Green begins his career at the Ford Motor Company. He
realizes that cars don't need to be stored in a central place like Manhattan.
He rents a surplus aircraft carrier after the Korean conflict on which to store
FordÕs new product. The only
available birth is on the east river, beside the United Nations building. Mr.
Ford personally nixes the idea: he doesn't want a Ford aircraft carrier
pointing its armament at the UN.
1963 K-Mart opens in suburban
London (Huron Heights Plaza, Oxford and Commissioners) one year after opening
its first discount department store in Michigan. In 1962, all four of the
largest U.S. general merchandisers had the same idea at exactly the same time:
self-service for general merchandise. Within a three month period, Kresge's (K-Mart), Woolworth (Woolco), Dayton Hudson (Target) and Wal-Mart, all opened their prototypes. It only took a year to get
the first of the new modules into Ontario in a more relaxed planning system.
(The delay in accepting new ideas would lengthen: Price Club opened in 1976 in California, but it took 12 years for
its first module to appear in Ontario).
Though a beautiful example of early space-age architecture,
the Oxford Street store never gets any historical designation, or
acknowledgement. (Nor do commercial icons on the roads, the huge green man on Eglinton
East holding a muffler, the rocket ship beside rocket carwash, etc.)
1963 David Huff
perfects the gravity model (Land
Economics, vol 39). The Huff model incorporates the conceptual framework of
Reilly and other gravity models, but is focused on the spatial behaviour of
consumers. Shopping centre offerings are an expression of the centre's mass
(its attractive force). Travel time is inversely related to a shopping centre's
utility: the farther the customer lives from a centre, the less likely a trip
will be made to that centre.
Gravity models prove very popular among supermarket chains:
they can predict reasonably well the potential sales of a small generic store
functioning among an urban competitive network. The Huff model implicitly
states that consumer behaviour in an urban area is flexible and complex, and
that shopping behaviour is governed by a whole range of choices in relation to
retail size and inversely proportion to the friction of distance of getting
there.
Gravity models appear to work particularly well for
convenience and commodity applications: supermarkets, pharmacies and liquor (in
the United States). Comparison and destination merchandise work less well.
All retail is gravity: the consumer will shop at the first
intervening opportunity (that meets his/her expectations). In the 1960s, of
course, any new mall met their expectations. Today, they will by-pass stores
that don't meet their expectations, or bypass any 20,000 square foot
supermarket, and so the gravity model doesn't work as well any more.
When you have competitive merchandise and two or more
stores, gravity comes into play. If you can describe the process, in theory,
you can model it, but to do it well, the data inputs start to become
formidable. The early work on gravity models, however, didn't bother with any real
world inputs.
1963 The Colonade opens on Bloor West as an example of what
can be done with mixed use zoning: underground parking, street front stores,
enclosed first floor retail (including the Jack
and Jill cafŽ), two floors of offices, and then rental apartments.
1963
University subway line opens, 2.4 miles, $40 million.
1963 Ontario
cities to get malls in 1963 include Brantford (Colborne Square),
Brockville, Kingston, Kitchener (Forest Hill), Sault Ste. Marie (Pike Street
Plaza), Port Arthur (Grandview) and Toronto (Bayview Village).
1964 The Highway Book Shop opens on
the Trans-Canada near Cobalt. You could not image a more out-of-the-way
location, in the "middle of no-where" (click here). It is voted Ontario's most popular bookstore by Star readers in 1981. Its collection of
gently used books is outstanding, making it a true destination location.
1964
E.P. Taylor's Northern Dancer
wins the Kentucky Derby.
1964 Petulia Clark
records ÒDowntownÓ in Memphis on the American Label. Quite a swansong. The
lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all
your cares.
The Gershwin estate sues for copyright violation. The case
is lost, although Downtown is substantially similar to ÒIÕve Got Plenty of
NothingÓ, the riff in question is identical to that in ÒYe Banks and Braes of
Bonny DoonÓ, which was already in the public domain. Downtown wins, but ultimately
Downtown loses.
1964 Yorkdale opens. My first introduction to Ontario
retailing was in the pages of the London
Times when it reported on February 26, the opening of Yorkdale Shopping
Centre. "One of the biggest shopping centres in the world" was hailed
by the international press around the world as a great innovation (click here for the 1964 opening photo I saw). Rents averaged $4 per square foot.
Today, theyÕre some $150 per square foot.
Yorkdale is the first shopping centre I see after stepping
off the plane from the old country (Europe didn't have anything like this). Day
two in Toronto, I visit the marvel. Years later, it was a very special thrill
to work for Yorkdale. I felt that an angel of fate has laid her hand on my head
(click here for a picture in Yorkdale).
Day two in Toronto, I open a charge account at the Yorkdale Eaton's. Just stepped off the plane, and
they give me credit. Start of a very slippery slope. Friends have said that
I've got to establish a credit rating and this is the easiest way. I buy a
package of envelopes to write home and discover Ontario has a sales tax.
Yorkdale has maintained its cracker-jack success; no other
major centre has been able to compete within the first half million consumers
nearest to the site. In 1964, as the only regional centre in the Province, it
had a huge "novelty" trade area. As competitors were built, it
contracted to a 20-mile radius. Now with its radius clauses, it maintains a
stranglehold over a five-mile radius. And what a lucrative radius that is:
North Toronto, south North York.
Because it was so new and unique, it took a while to workout
its proper mix (it opened with seven furniture stores and a low-end discounter).
Yorkdale becomes like Grand Central Station, a never-ending stream of people, a
high-density entertainment for the masses. A typical customer will touch one
hundred items in a shopping trip there.
Trizec negotiated 100,000 square feet of office at Yorkdale,
which was later upped to 300,000 square feet, without any parking requirements.
1964 Other new
Ontario malls overshadowed by the hoopla over Yorkdale include Lakeside
(Burlington), Thames-Lea (beside the river in Chatham), Oakridges (London),
Fairlawn (Ottawa), K-Mart Plaza (Sault Ste. Marie), Northtown (Welland) and
Kendalwood Park (Whitby). The only other plaza to open in Metro is
Burnhamthorpe Mall in Etobicoke.
1964 The little
cuties born this year will be the last of the great cohort, the baby boom.
As the Beatles appear on the Ed Sullivan show, this gigantic
generation comes to an end.
1965 Scarborough
Library Board establishes the first branch library in a shopping centre, in
Eglinton Square, and after that enthusiastic response, puts them into Agincourt
Mall (1967) and Morningside Mall (1968).
1965 I arrive in
Ontario the day the Toronto City Hall opens (September 13, 1965). As I contemplate
the first skyscrapers I have ever seen from the second floor of the College
Street Y (I am thinking, "I wish they would start working"), the
downtown sky erupts with fireworks to celebrate the new City Hall. Streetcars
are still running on Bloor Street, the CIBC tower is the tallest downtown, the Saverin is on Bay, near the University
of Toronto there is the Embassy,
(with its ladies and escorts room; now a Harry
Rosen), the Bay/Bloor Tavern (now
Manulife), Place Pigale and the Myrna
Bird. The Don Valley Parkway only reached Eglinton, and Highway No. 401
stopped at Kingston. The subsequent proliferation of expressways had two
notable effects: (1) traffic by-passed the old cores (it no longer went by
Highway No. 2 through Port Hope and Cobourg, for instance), and (2) retailers
sought out the new traffic flows. Both effects have generated enormous urban
literature: who won and who lost? The people (and the stores) who lost out with
the new traffic flows were those who could not adapt.
The accessibility of all Ontario towns became so good that,
when the shopping centres arrived during the 1960s and 1970s and then the
big-boxes arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, the impacts were lessened, because
the Province's residents were already adept at travelling huge distances in
search of bargains. Unlike many of the mid-western states. Day three in Toronto
I visit Don Mills Centre. "That's E.P. Taylor having a coke", someone
says. "Who?", says I.
1965 Peanut Plaza
opens in North York surrounded by high density apartments. Other Ontario malls
include Applewood Village (Mississauga), Nipissing Shopping Plaza (North Bay),
East Mall in Oshawa and the Towers-Food City complex in suburban
Peterborough.
1965 William Applebaum
makes trade area definition a scientific procedure, Economic Geography, vol. 41.
It is marvellous to watch how distance and detachment work
in the real world in conditioning shopping patterns and every time creates a
trade area. Yet, some trade areas are stronger than others (see Summary of 544 surveys).
1966 Towne & Countrye
Square opens on the Metro border. It began in 1962 with a Sayvette and then the next year a Loblaws was added (Sayvette was operated in that era by Loblaws). A single level enclosed ÒTÓ shaped mall link was
constructed in 1966. Nine years later, Canadian
Tire and The Bay arrive.
Jane Sheppard Mall and West Side Mall are the only other
major malls in Metro to open in 1966. Ancaster gets Ancaster Commons, Kitchener
Fairview Plaza, London Argyle Mall, Sault Ste. Marie Market Square and Fort
William Cataraqui Square (a successful downtown strip mall with free parking,
that transfers commerce away from Simpson Street).
1966 The Detroit
riots spur shopping at home in Windsor, the arrival of Simpsons-Sears and the
development of Devonshire Mall on Howard Avenue.
1966 The
underground pedestrian system begins downtown with the opening of the
Richmond-Adelaide Centre and then the Mies van der Rohe's first tower of
CadillacÕs TD Centre two years later. These giant buildings ensure good traffic
flows underground--something unheard of in Europe. (Ultimately, the TD building
with 10,000 employees is a locus of personal expenditure of $100 million
annually, and its stores are in the top five in Canadian sales productivity).
Unfortunately, Toronto copies Montreal and William Zeckendorf's
Place Ville Marie's underground city (1962). (In the 1960s, Montreal was the
retail style leader in Canada with Expo, the country's only Gucci store and its only Playboy club; Montreal had the first
major downtown transformation with Place Ville Marie). Place Ville Marie's
200,000 square feet of retailing was buried underground. Cities that boomed at
least a decade later--Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Halifax—followed
Calgary with its "plus 15s" (skywalks). Calgary had to have skywalks
because it is in a river valley, and cannot easily go down to create an
underground city.
Toronto Planning, by exempting the lower retail arcades from
allowable density calculations, encourages the vertical separation of shopping
and vehicles.
Today it's a troglodyte's delight, over a million square
feet and almost a thousand stores buried under Toronto's downtown, about a
fifth of the retail space there (up from five percent in the mid-1970s). The
ballet of the street suffered.
1966 The opening
of the Bloor subway, on February 26, rather than the Parliament Street
loop, solidified Bloor from Avenue to Yonge as a retail node in its own right.
Soon Manulife (1973: 280,000 square feet),
Hudsons Bay Centre (1975: 420,000 square feet), Hazelton Lanes (1976: 210,000
square feet), and Holt Renfrew (1979:
215,000 square feet) would arrive due to the superlative accessibility of the
subway intersection.
The ÒYÓ interchange on the subway is only operated for six
months; everyone is concentrated at Bloor, for which the station was not built.
1966 My M.A. thesis
on downtown Toronto is accepted. The bid rent curve for central space has
declined over the past 13 years (click
here for diagram the x-axis is logarithmic).
1967 St. Laurent
is the first regional shopping centre in Ottawa anchored by Sears and Dominion. Other new Ontario malls include Frontenac Mall
(Kingston), Eastwood (Kitchener), Northland (London), Midtown (Oshawa), K-Mart
Plaza (Bells Corners), Midtown (St. Catharines) and Agincourt Mall in
Scarborough.
1967 Expo opens
in Montreal. The Ontario restaurant there can serve liquor on Sundays, while
the real Province goes without.
1967 Sparks Street
Pedestrian Mall opens, following the lead of Kalamazoo, MI. Kalamazoo
reverts back to traffic; Sparks Street does not (click here).
1967 The Polsuns
and Jimmy Kay, the owner of Fairweather,
buy the 52 stores of Tip Top Tailors,
and take the merged company public. The roller coaster of their share price
begins. They purchase Bi-Way, Town and Country and controlling
interests in Club Monaco and Harry Rosen for a roster of age-related
niche stores.
1967 Dean Muncaster
is appointed President of Canadian Tire
at the ripe old age of 33. He worked in his father's Sudbury store in his
youth. For the next decade, the chain would register 20 percent per year sales
growth.
Canadian Tire is the first Ontario organization to
adopt point-of-sale computers and a perpetual inventory system with automatic
re-ordering, avoiding stock-outs. The Canadian business press, however, prefers
to focus on the antics of the controlling family.
1968 Metro Toronto
is second only to New York City in North America in construction contracts
awarded.
1968 BA Oil is swallowed by Gulf. Loyal customers mourn.
1968 Leading edge
of the baby boom reaches 20 years of age.
1968 William Applebaum
outlines ÒThe Analogue Method for Estimating Potential Store SalesÓ for
supermarkets in the 10,000 to 15,000 square foot range (Guide to Store Location Research, 1968). By making explicit
comparisons between the performance of existing outlets and key factors, an
analyst can predict the sales of any new (small) site if its characteristics
are known. Ominously, for new format food stores, he notes, Òthe best the
analyst can do is to guesstimate and use his own judgement, based on such data
as are available to himÓ. When I quote this to Miracle Food Mart, they pretend to be horrified, and do not hire
me.
1968 The first
Canadian McDonald's opens at
Oxford and Huron in London, quickly followed by Brampton, Bathurst and Steeles,
Keele Street and south Islington, where I encounter my first Big Mac. I confuse
them by asking for a knife and fork. In the UK, you always ate a
"Wimpy" that way. It would be another nine years before McDonald's
Canada opened for breakfast.
It took McDonald's
16 years to reach Canada. The first chain location opened in San Bernadino in
1952. I work for McDonald's planning
locations: municipalities at first are fearful of the litter that is
characteristic of the older-style chains.
1968 New malls
include Burlington Mall, Brookdale and Eastcourt (Cornwall), London Mall,
K-Mart Plaza in Ottawa, Meadowlands in Nepean, Lincoln Mall in St. Catharines,
Riverside Plaza in Windsor, and two in Metro, Jane Finch and Kipling Heights.
1969 The Gap opens on Ocean Boulevard
in San Francisco. It would take two decades to get the first store in Ontario.
1969 Toronto
begins paying half the cost for the underground connections in the downtown
system. The first beneficiaries are the Wellington Street tunnel (TD to Royal
Bank) and the King Street tunnel (TD to First Canadian Place).
1969 The Royal
Commission on Evening Shopping travels the country to probe consumers'
reactions. Women, who have been entering the workforce in great numbers over
the 1960s, want the freedom to shop when it is convenient for them. Female
participation in the work force had reached 30 percent and they did not have
much time to shop through a weekday (Bruce Mallen, The Benefits and Costs of Evening Shopping to the Canadian Economy,
April 1969).
1969 New 1969
Ontario malls include Sheridan SC (a very successful strip between K-Mart and Dominion in Mississauga), Stanley Park (Kitchener), Mcadoo Park
(Kingston), Shoppers World Brampton (uniquely offering two department stores, Sears and K-Mart, and two supermarkets, A&P
and Food City), Westwood
(Mississauga), K-Mart Plaza (St. Catharines), Royal Orchard (Thornhill), County
Fair (Fort William) and Centenary Plaza, a couple of years late, in
Scarborough.
Comments,
additions, anecdotes, public data,
published
sources, photos (credited), and/or
corrections
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