Midtown Plaza (Saskatoon)
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| Midtown Plaza | |
| Mall facts and statistics | |
|---|---|
| Location | Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada |
| Opening date | 1969 |
| Owner | Oxford Properties |
| No. of stores and services | 132 |
| No. of anchor tenants | 2 |
| Total retail floor area | 616,282 square feet [1] |
| Parking | 1,000 surface and 796 underground |
| No. of floors | 2 |
| Website | http://www.midtownplaza.ca/ |
Midtown Plaza is a shopping mall in downtown Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, owned by the Oxford Properties Group. [2] The two main anchors are Sears Canada and The Bay and the shopping centre has a total store count of approximately 130 stores. The mall was built on the former site of the city's main railway station as part of a major inner city redevelopment project in the 1960s that also saw construction of a freeway, the Sidney L. Buckwold Bridge, and a major arts/convention complex (once called the Centennial Auditorium, but now called TCU Place). Midtown Plaza opened in 1969 as a single-level mall with approximately 60 stores, and in the 1980s underwent a major expansion that added a second floor as well as a main floor food court, roughly doubling its tenants.
Initially the mall's anchors were Sears, Dominion (a grocery store), a Famous Players movie theatre, and Eaton's. In the 1980s, Dominion closed its Western Canadian stores, and the Midtown Plaza location sat vacant for several years, being used for special event programming, etc. before being converted into a food court. Eaton's shut down in the early 2000s and was replaced by The Bay, and the movie theatre also closed down around this time. (The former movie theatre location remains "unassigned" as of 2006 according to the mall's website.)
In the early 1980s a small boutique-style shopping centre called Midtown Village opened adjacent to the west side of the mall. Initially popular, over time interest in Midtown Village waned and with the construction of the 2nd floor of the Midtown Plaza, many of the stores in the Village left for the Midtown Plaza. The Midtown Village became part of the Midtown Plaza in 1989 and is currently entirely leased by Saskatchewan Property Management Corporation Community Services. Another addition to the complex was the construction of a Toys "R" Us store; this store is not physically connected to the mall, being built on a former section of plaza parking lot and separated from the mall by 20th Street, but is still considered part of Midtown Plaza.
Also part of the Midtown Plaza complex is CN Towers, an office block that was for most of the 1970s the tallest building in Saskatoon. Besides professional offices, from the 1970s to the early 2000s it also housed the broadcast facilities for the city's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation affiliate, CBKST. In the late 1970s a one-ton piece of concrete fell off the side of the CN Towers, crashing into the mall below and killing one person; the mall and the office block were subsequently closed for several days while engineers assessed the building's integrity.
