Bloor West Village copied in Don Mills

shops-at-don-mills

National  Post has a story yesterday Cadillac Fairview (the owner of Sherway Gardens Mall) is opening a new retail mall named The Shops at Don Mills, a collection of standalone stores built along open-air streets.

Some of the shops… chef Mark McEwan’s first gourmet market, Ontario’s first McNally Robinson bookstore and Canada’s first Anthropologie store.

Its pedestrian-friendly streets will be lined with trees; shoppers can enjoy an outdoor, 7,134 sq. ft. skating rink, central square (something the Junction needs) with a fountain and a range of restaurants; there will be public art. Eventually, 1,300 high-rise residential units will be built on the site.

The results are more along the lines of Bloor West Village, where people walk from shop to shop outside,” said Anne Morash, vice-president of development for Cadillac Fairview. ‘‘We’ve built the Shops at Don Mills on a scale that’s very manageable — it’s a fraction of the size of what regional malls and big boxes typically are, so it’s efficient.’’

Read the complete post at nationalpost.com

The Shops at Don Mills, website

…interested in municipal history or development you have to see this….

….Here is terrific link to an animated history of the block of land click!

here is the same timeline above with a modified link to have the time open in  a larger format without the rest of the normal surounding page

2 Comments

Bloor West Village has pedestrian oriented development on an important major street, which is very attractive. This development is mostly parking lots fronting major streets. Only the No Frills in BWV is comparable with its parking lot by Bloor, and that's the definitive low point of BWV's built form.

agreed, yet the main point is that a huge property company/developer is attesting to the value of the street scape. And I continue to wonder why the choose BWV to compare too.

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