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rfmcdonaldThis Saturday's Historicist feature at Torontoist, written by Kevin Plummer, examined the birth of Toronto's Yorkdale Mall.
Pkummer's essay, illustrated with an abundance of period photos, makes the point that the Yorkdale Mall was launched and designed as one element of Toronto's great booming suburbanization in the 1960s, that in many ways Yorkdale with its precise architectural planning and careful market research and location on what had been the distant fringes of the provincial capital was a prototype. In 2005 and 2009, I wrote about how the modernity that Yorkdale imagined--a prosperous self-contained modernity, an arcology almost, physically linked to the core by highway and eventually subway--now seemed dated. But then, expecting perfect knowledge of the future a half-century removed would be expecting too much.
Go, read.
On February 26, 1964, shoppers dressed in their Sunday best walked through Yorkdale Shopping Centre for the first time. With over 1.2 million square feet of retail, restaurants, and services—although not all of them were yet leased on opening day—Yorkdale was briefly the largest indoor shopping mall in the world.
With three anchor stores—Simpsons at the west, Eaton’s at the east, and a Dominion at the south—Yorkdale was oriented in an L-shaped indoor shopping street. Shoppers could stroll in climate controlled comfort from one end to another, passing stores like Reitman’s, Collyer Shoes, Laura Secord, Toy World, and Eddie Black’s Camera Store along the way. There was a dual cinema, and Encore Noshery was the largest restaurant in a Canadian shopping centre. Until that point, many suburbanites had continued to conduct their shopping downtown. But Yorkdale represented a new feature of postwar life where the best-known stores of the core were installed on the periphery. “It’s Instant Downtown—even though it’s Uptown,” as one promotional article put it.
Not everyone was impressed, however. In the June 1964 issue of Canadian Architect, architect Ron Thom judged: “It is a gigantic compendium of follies, and it fails disastrously to answer up to the complex sociological conditions implicit in any such place, particularly one of this size.”
Noting the influence of New Formalism, Robert Moffatt described Andrews’ work on the three-storey Simpsons: “Pairs of arched columns line the perimeter of the building, curving upward into deep parapets that gently flare outward at the top. The precast concrete cladding, when new, was a pristine white and glittered with Georgian quartz aggregate. Inset panels were Simpson’s blue.” The 83 porcelain-enamel steel panels were reversible to provide the opportunity to change the design scheme’s accent colours. Although taken alone the store was better regarded, Hugo-Brunt complained that viewed from the north, the two department stores “contrast unhappily with each other.”
Perhaps more important than the work of the architect, Howard Lesser wrote in Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (June 1964), was the work of the Planning and Development Consultant. Lesser was the consultant who’d worked on the Yorkdale project; his role was determining the required square footage of selling area and storage for each category of merchandise, the number of shop units in each category, and their arrangement around the interior to ensure balanced competition at varying price levels across different retail categories.
Armed with market research and other information, the developers carefully selected which retailers would be invited to become tenants in order to appeal to a broad range of shoppers. While the department stores would carry some higher-end wares, a Kresge’s would cater to bargain shoppers. Similarly, in addition to a Birks, there would also be a Peoples Credit Jewellers. The King Street West men’s tailor, Beauchamp and Howe would be there, but so would Tip Top Tailors. Shop owners would pay rent of $5 per square foot while other plazas in Metro only charged $2.50 to $3.00. (By contrast, however, Yonge Street landlords commanded rents of $7 to $12.)
Such reliance on expertise at the conception and design stage of the project, however, would open Yorkdale to a common critique among its detractors: that the mall was more the product of market researchers, statisticians, and computer operators than of an architect. “I suspect,” Thom lamented, “that the final results are due as much as anything to the owners’ and developers’ decision to make the statisticians responsible for the architecture.”
Pkummer's essay, illustrated with an abundance of period photos, makes the point that the Yorkdale Mall was launched and designed as one element of Toronto's great booming suburbanization in the 1960s, that in many ways Yorkdale with its precise architectural planning and careful market research and location on what had been the distant fringes of the provincial capital was a prototype. In 2005 and 2009, I wrote about how the modernity that Yorkdale imagined--a prosperous self-contained modernity, an arcology almost, physically linked to the core by highway and eventually subway--now seemed dated. But then, expecting perfect knowledge of the future a half-century removed would be expecting too much.
Looking back, Yorkdale evokes what Shawn Micallef called “utopian modernism” in Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (Coach House Books, 2010). But at the time, architecture critics lambasted Yorkdale’s interior. “The shop frontages vary extensively,” Hugo-Brunt wrote, “and their elevational diversity reflects a lack of discipline or control.” Thom complained that the majority of the mall “resembles a group of separate parts, each designed by an angry individualist, determined not only to outdo, but to undo all the other parts around—a sort of architectural salad.” Although still critical, at least interior designer Allison Hymas acknowledged the limits of such critiques in the Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (June 1964): “The design critic must bear in mind that this is essentially real estate and not architecture; that return on financial investment is the aim of the developers and not a concern for the creation of well ordered buildings in which buying and selling take place.”
Go, read.
