Teddog and the Mews
Nov. 26th, 2008 02:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teddogI have this soft spot for lost and just plain ODD places in Toronto. Not fully sure why. Tonight, let's talk about the Eaton Centre and an odd misadventure in the late 1990s.
I guess at first glance, this giant cathedral of retail good isn't very odd. It's pretty darn mainstream and nothing more than a giant tourist trap. That said, it gives me a odd and baffling feeling that I live and work around it (almost dreamlike), that I could visit it every day if I really wanted to, but now that I can, it's not really appealing. It's full of tourists, packed to crush levels at times. The most notable thing is that it has a Canadian Tire on my way home from work, although it means that I have to deal with Dundas station.
But let's go back for a second and look at just what this odd place meant as a brat growing up just outside of Toronto. Canadian malls, as a rule of thumb, tend to be a smaller than their American counterparts. We never really evolved major regional complexes to the scale of what happened in the US. While we do have dying malls, it's not to the scale of what's been happening in the states, probably because we have less to lose.
At the time, I lived in Mississauga and our local mall was a very early version of Dixie Mall back when it was called Dixie Plaza and there were no talk of Outlets. A short drive away were Sherway Gardens and Square One. Square One was preferred, because they had things for kids, like these cool periscope, a playground set up like a stagecoach and a carousel. But nothing compared to the Eaton Centre.
This was back in a time where mall owners would run ads for a MALL on TV, just not the stores. This is important, because there was one special thing about the Eaton Centre - it looked DIFFERENT. The design is based on the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. This wasn't your standard shopping mall. It was shopping in the FUTURE. Well, that and it still has an amazing sense of space to this day.
An ad from the year I was born. I swear this was cooler in the 1980s. Note the stupid scene at 00:30. This is the subject of my curiosity.
It's taken from the Mews level, AKA level 4. I rarely got to visit the Eaton Centre as a kid and found myself there in the late 1990s on a field trip. My best guess for a timeline would be 1997 or early 1998. Anyway, we were dumped at the Eaton Centre for lunch and me, being my normal exploring self, decided to poke around. I got on an elevator and noticed a level labeled "Mews". I figured that it sounded cool and went up.
Problem is that the Mews level was a mess. The two main stores on the floor were a Lenscrafters and a restaurant. The rest of it was this strange hallway. It was located between the two stores and started heading west before it slowly curved south, or at least it does in my memory of it. The strangest part was that although it was in the middle of a giant tourist trap, it was completely empty. Glass doors and windows on either side, like a strange tunnel that went to nowhere.
Yeah, I was a little weirded out. I think I stopped off at the bathroom and took off out of there. This was before I had learned about dead malls and their quirks, so I never thought to look for label scars or any other signs of past life.
The next time I visited, it was a year later. I remembered the strange Mews and wanted to see it again, just to see if anyone had moved in. Well, a large bookstore had, gutting out everything that had been there before. The mystery of the Mews was gone.
It's eaten at me since, off and on. What on Earth had I found? Did it exist? Was I imagining things? I searched repeatedly for "Mews Eaton Centre" on Google every few years and got no hits.
The location has come to mind again, mostly due to a fic idea I had, and on a fluke I decided to search for "4th floor Eaton Centre". And, finally, some answers!
It was being used as retail space up until at least the mid-1990s. It was also home to the art gallery Access Art Now/Access Art Gallery and a poster shop. Not typically what you'd imagine in a fashion mall. I have no clue what else lurked back there. The earliest copy of the Eaton Centre website that I can dig up lists only Lenscrafters and the restaurant, back in 1997. Access Art Now left in 1995. At the same time, I'm sure that whatever did exist there probably is a lot more interesting in my mind's eye than it actually was. But still.
I guess at first glance, this giant cathedral of retail good isn't very odd. It's pretty darn mainstream and nothing more than a giant tourist trap. That said, it gives me a odd and baffling feeling that I live and work around it (almost dreamlike), that I could visit it every day if I really wanted to, but now that I can, it's not really appealing. It's full of tourists, packed to crush levels at times. The most notable thing is that it has a Canadian Tire on my way home from work, although it means that I have to deal with Dundas station.
But let's go back for a second and look at just what this odd place meant as a brat growing up just outside of Toronto. Canadian malls, as a rule of thumb, tend to be a smaller than their American counterparts. We never really evolved major regional complexes to the scale of what happened in the US. While we do have dying malls, it's not to the scale of what's been happening in the states, probably because we have less to lose.
At the time, I lived in Mississauga and our local mall was a very early version of Dixie Mall back when it was called Dixie Plaza and there were no talk of Outlets. A short drive away were Sherway Gardens and Square One. Square One was preferred, because they had things for kids, like these cool periscope, a playground set up like a stagecoach and a carousel. But nothing compared to the Eaton Centre.
This was back in a time where mall owners would run ads for a MALL on TV, just not the stores. This is important, because there was one special thing about the Eaton Centre - it looked DIFFERENT. The design is based on the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. This wasn't your standard shopping mall. It was shopping in the FUTURE. Well, that and it still has an amazing sense of space to this day.
An ad from the year I was born. I swear this was cooler in the 1980s. Note the stupid scene at 00:30. This is the subject of my curiosity.
It's taken from the Mews level, AKA level 4. I rarely got to visit the Eaton Centre as a kid and found myself there in the late 1990s on a field trip. My best guess for a timeline would be 1997 or early 1998. Anyway, we were dumped at the Eaton Centre for lunch and me, being my normal exploring self, decided to poke around. I got on an elevator and noticed a level labeled "Mews". I figured that it sounded cool and went up.
Problem is that the Mews level was a mess. The two main stores on the floor were a Lenscrafters and a restaurant. The rest of it was this strange hallway. It was located between the two stores and started heading west before it slowly curved south, or at least it does in my memory of it. The strangest part was that although it was in the middle of a giant tourist trap, it was completely empty. Glass doors and windows on either side, like a strange tunnel that went to nowhere.
Yeah, I was a little weirded out. I think I stopped off at the bathroom and took off out of there. This was before I had learned about dead malls and their quirks, so I never thought to look for label scars or any other signs of past life.
The next time I visited, it was a year later. I remembered the strange Mews and wanted to see it again, just to see if anyone had moved in. Well, a large bookstore had, gutting out everything that had been there before. The mystery of the Mews was gone.
It's eaten at me since, off and on. What on Earth had I found? Did it exist? Was I imagining things? I searched repeatedly for "Mews Eaton Centre" on Google every few years and got no hits.
The location has come to mind again, mostly due to a fic idea I had, and on a fluke I decided to search for "4th floor Eaton Centre". And, finally, some answers!
It was being used as retail space up until at least the mid-1990s. It was also home to the art gallery Access Art Now/Access Art Gallery and a poster shop. Not typically what you'd imagine in a fashion mall. I have no clue what else lurked back there. The earliest copy of the Eaton Centre website that I can dig up lists only Lenscrafters and the restaurant, back in 1997. Access Art Now left in 1995. At the same time, I'm sure that whatever did exist there probably is a lot more interesting in my mind's eye than it actually was. But still.
