The Shops of Don Mills | Phase 1 complete | Don Mills

[kettal]

This new shopping "neighbourhood" is being praised today by Christopher Hume

Don Mills centre will be the anti-mall
RENÉ JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR

Cadillac Fairview has seen the future – and it looks a lot like the past.

Next week, the developer will open its latest shopping centre, a total overhaul of an older facility at the corner of Don Mills Rd. and Lawrence Ave. E.

But don't be fooled by the location; the new development is far from suburban. Instead of the ubiquitous big box full of the usual retail suspects, this venue, "Ontario's first outdoor urban village," is made up of shops, restaurants, offices and residential units organized around a square and a network of narrow tree-lined streets.

"We want people to enjoy this place," explains Cadillac Fairview vice president Anne Morash. "There's a hunger for public space."

Public may not be quite the right word. After all, this remains privately owned. But it feels public, and that's the main thing.

"This area needed retail that is in some way authentic," argues architect Ralph Giannone, whose firm Giannone Petricone designed the centre with pellow + associates architects. "This is not fictitious."

Indeed, it is the context – Canada's first planned community – that's starting to look fictitious. It's easy to forget, but when Don Mills was planned in the 1950s, suburb wasn't a dirty word. Half a century later, all that has changed, and so it was only a matter of time before change reached suburbia.

Of course, as large as the project may be (14 hectares when complete), it occupies a tiny corner of Don Mills. The usual elements – strip malls, overly wide roads, parking lots, and nondescript apartment buildings – are still much in evidence. To be fair, however, this may be suburbia, but it's not sprawl. That didn't appear until later.

Still, reality has to enter somewhere, and Don Mills is as good a place as any.

Though Morash refers to the new centre as an "emerging format" in the evolution of the mall, it represents a sort of closing of the circle. It's not quite a return to the roots of retail; in these parts such roots were never allowed to take hold. Although the 1950s mall, demolished to make way for this "village," was outdoors, it was a far cry from being a deliberate architectural recreation of an urban village. There was no "town square," skating oval, fountain, canopies or storefronts. There was never meant to be.

Now we have the anti-mall, the very thing the original facility was intended to replace.

As Giannone makes clear, "This is a mixed-use development, an infill project." In other words, the old single-use planning regime at the heart of the suburban ideal has also given way to something more subtle and reflective, a real life.

Naturally, there must still be parking, but now it's in a four-storey structure, not spread over acres. The streets that run through the place are narrow, pedestrian-scaled. Indeed, if there's one thing that distinguishes the village from its predecessors it is scale, based here on people, not cars.

The results can be seen in every detail, from the numerous benches and better-than-average materials to the fact the buildings are architectural and come right out to the sidewalk.

For now, however, it remains a construction site. When it opens next Wednesday, only 40 of the 100-odd shops will be occupied; the rest won't be ready until July or August.

So far, success seems certain. The advantages of the new/old approach are so obvious, they cannot be denied.

The issue, Morash says, is: "How to create urban space?"

If that's the question, this is the answer.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca

[kettal]

National Post

The mall that isn't
Posted: April 18, 2009, 6:01 AM by Ron Nurwisah
Neighbourhoods



The way you shop is about to change. Oh, and you’re going to be doing it in Don Mills

By Adam McDowell

Simone Gabbay still pines for the Don Mills Centre, decrepit and outmoded though it may have been.

“It was a very unique mall — I haven’t found any other in Toronto — where you could walk and say hello to several people that you know,” says the nutritionist and freelance writer, who has lived in Don Mills since 1992 and led a campaign against changes to her local shopping centre. “You’d always meet someone that you knew. It wasn’t really planned that way. It had grown that way.”

Will the mall now taking shape at the site of the old Don Mills Centre, at Don Mills and Lawrence, serve the same function? Its developer can at least argue that it’s designed to. When it opens on Tuesday, the Shops at Don Mills will be the city’s (and indeed the eastern half of Canada’s) introduction to the so-called “lifestyle centre,” a relatively novel shopping concept that during the past few years has swept across the United States like a bargain-crazed crowd at an H & M designer-label launch.

In the mind of Anne Morash, vice-president of development for Cadillac Fairview, the pace of the centre is relaxed. “I think as people’s tastes become more sophisticated, they want to come to an environment that’s a little quieter, a little easier to manoeuvre — one that they can walk about and not have to drive box to box,” she says while leading a tour along the private “streets” that will cut through the centre.

While discussing traffic speed, Morash makes a comparison between the Shops and Yorkville on a Saturday night. It’s not an image that squares easily with the reality on this day; a cold April wind blows as workmen move swiftly to and fro with deadlines looming.

Cadillac Fairview is giving the lifestyle shopping concept a boost on the strength of its tenants, some of which already have shoppers salivating their recession worries away. Forty of the eventual 90 stores will open this week, including the first location of ski and snowboard shop Salomon outside of a resort, the first McNally Robinson bookstore in Ontario and the first Canadian location of Anthropologie, the elegant sister brand of Urban Outfitters.

The remaining tenants will open over the course of the spring and summer, including Glow, caterer Rose Reisman’s first restaurant, which will overlook the Shops’ “public square,” and McEwan, a gourmet grocery store from chef Mark McEwan (of Bymark, One Restaurant and North 44), which will battle Pusateri’s for the pantries of Post Road.

Why would these tenants choose to locate here? First, it offers relative proximity to the Bridle Path, Leaside and other well-off neighbourhoods that have had few respectable retailers and “premium casual” restaurants close at hand.

Just as important, the development gives retailers something new to try, something more intimate than a big mall like Fairview but classier than a power centre.
Tory McNally, director of operations for McNally Robinson, says, “It is a mall that turns all of the preconceived notions of a mall on their heads.”

Between the Douglas Coupland-designed clock tower, the live music events, the skating oval at the central square and “the country’s first robotic water feature,” the Shops at Don Mills is a mall that tries hard to lure browsers in. It will also have a captive audience thanks to office space on the site, which will be joined eventually by residences (Cadillac Fairview has an application in process for 1,300 condo units).

Like any typical lifestyle centre, the Shops combine the aspirational shopping opportunities of a downtown strip à la Bloor Street with the convenience of ample parking and drive-up storefronts in an antiseptic environment mimicking the traditional downtown.

“We could have put a Wal-Mart and a Costco on this site and been done with it,” says Morash. “Both of those retailers have a strong interest in being in this trade area. But that’s not really the business Cadillac Fairview is in.”

Morash describes the Shops as being at the front of a wave, but the company, and Canada in general, are really at the trailing edge. Although the first real lifestyle centres appeared in the 1980s and have popped up everywhere from West Vancouver’s Park Royal Village to New England to Australia, they’re primarily a phenomenon of the American west and south. Most of the 406 centres now doing business in the United States were built during the past decade; CNN counted 120 of them just four years ago.

The trade magazine Shopping Centers Today noted that “unlike the U.S., Canada has not witnessed the same degree of suburbanization of affluence,” meaning our wealthy residents have stayed closer to downtown shopping districts. However, another geographical fact is cited more often to explain Canada’s resistance to lifestyle centres: winter.

Around 2003, when Cadillac Fairview revealed its plans to demolish the nearly 50-year-old Don Mills Centre and replace it with Toronto’s first open-air lifestyle centre, some local residents decided the time for warm receptions was over. Gabbay and the Friends of Don Mills argued on behalf of local seniors and disabled people in favour of an enclosed structure.

Monash says Cadillac Fairview is confident the public will brave the cold to shop in Don Mills. “Our view of the world, and our research and what retailers and consumers have told us, is that Canadians are a hardy bunch. If you go out on a day like today and go to Yonge and Bloor, you’ll see people out shopping, out running errands. We’re not fearful of the weather.”

Another point of contention with the Friends of Don Mills is the mix of retailers: Gabbay and others have complained their lifestyles won’t be reflected in the tony shops.

Cadillac Fairview has repeatedly dismissed the suggestion, arguing that its tenants will be “the best at what they do,” not the most expensive. “We didn’t build this for the Bridle Path. We’re trying to target the consumer who lives in the neighbourhood, really of all income levels,” Morash says.

After several years of council and Ontario Municipal Board hearings, rallies, petitions and two failed attempts by anti-Cadillac Fairview candidates to unseat councillors perceived as too sympathetic to the new plans, Gabbay realizes she and her allies have lost. Even she’s warming up to the idea of The Shops at Don Mills. “I won’t go to the opening. It’s not a reason to celebrate. I am really looking forward to the bookstore. I can’t wait.”

National Post
amcdowell@nationalpost.com

[Skybean]

I live close by, so I'll be interested to see how this development pans out. It's nice to hear that some nicer materials than average have been used for this project. There was a huge public outcry about the demolishing of the covered mall. I wonder if those perceptions will change.

[Skybean]

I went to the Shops yesterday. It was really a different experience than the typical mall. The shops are definitely of higher quality than you'd normally see. Cadillac Fairview must have spent a considerable amount of money on the street furniture (benches, garbage cans, street lamps). The area is completely different than what it was before. The central space is perfect for sidewalk cafes. As more restaurants open, this will definitely be very active in the summer months.

There are already too many cars which criss-cross the roads between the shops. This causes pedestrians to have to wait for cars to pass before they can continue walking between shops. I can only imagine the level of traffic as soon as the residential component of this development is completed.

Overall, it's a unique shopping experience and I'd visit again once more of the shops have moved in. I only wish that Cadillac Fairview could have incorporated more multi-storey retail. Most of the shops are single storey with offices above.

[Mollywood]

I can't believe a young punk, security guard, came up to me and asked why I was taking pictures and gave me a hard time, until I got piseed and started getting sarcastic. He even lied and said he saw me there filming the day before, and then changed it and said the guy looked like me. WTF! He backed off when I started asking questions, and let me continue my filming. There were 100 other people filming and taking pics, so I don't know why he stopped to question me. I asked him "Do I look like a terrorist, or something?" That's when he started to back off. lol

"Why are you taking pictures?" BECAUSE I WANT TO! lol And because I'm reporting for skyscrapercity and Urban Toronto!!! LOL


By torontovibe, shot with DSC-N1 at 2009-04-25


By torontovibe, shot with DSC-N1 at 2009-04-25


By Torontovibe at 2009-04-25


By torontovibe, shot with DSC-N1 at 2009-04-25


By torontovibe, shot with DSC-N1 at 2009-04-25

By torontovibe, shot with DSC-N1 at 2009-04-25

By torontovibe, shot with DSC-N1 at 2009-04-25


By torontovibe, shot with DSC-N1 at 2009-04-25

The parking lot.

By torontovibe, shot with DSC-N1 at 2009-04-25



And for those of you who like to see your pictures moving, here is the video I made.
http://torontovibe.ning.com/video/th...s-of-don-mills

[Skybean]

Originally Posted by Mollywood

I can't believe a young punk, security guard, came up to me and asked why I was taking pictures and gave me a hard time

Maybe he was in love with you.

Visited the McEwan's high end grocer today



Pretty good stuff. They have Australian Wagyu for $79.99 / lb, jumbo shrimp for $29.99 / lb. $10 quails and $3.12 bags of chips. A tub of Breyers ice cream is $8.49.