Alberni Mall

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Alberni Mall is an indoor shopping mall located in Port Alberni, British Columbia.

[edit] History

Alberni Mall, located on the southeast corner of Cherry Creek and Johnston Roads, opened its doors for the first time in April 1979. Safeway and K-Mart were the mall's original anchor tenants, while other major retailers in the beginning included Fields, Boots Drug Store, Peoples Jewellers and Orange Julius. In later years, Boots (which closed its Canadian stores in the 1980s) was replaced at the mall by People's Drug Mart, and eventually by Pharmasave, while Sears Canada had a dealer store located in the mall in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Alberni Mall prospered through the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, but hard times began to befall the mall beginning in 1996, when Safeway closed its location at the mall, even though they retained their lease; rather than let a competing supermarket chain take over their former space, Safeway opted to sub-lease it to Liquidation World. In 1998, the Canadian stores of K-Mart were purchased by the Hudson's Bay Company, with the intent of turning most of them into Zellers stores and closing the rest; one of the stores HBC chose to close was the Alberni Mall K-Mart, which was subsequently demolished to make way for a new Canadian Tire store.

The mall eventually went into further decline with the construction across Johnston Road of a new power centre called the Pacific Rim Shopping Centre, which opened in early-2005 with Wal-Mart and Extra Foods as its anchors, followed by the closure of the Liquidation World store in May 2006 (several months after Safeway's lease on the location expired), which led to a further exodus of retailers. From a high of about 35 stores and services in the mid-1980s, Alberni Mall is currently approaching dead mall status as it is now down to just four businesses left—Canadian Tire, The Source by Circuit City, Mark's Work Wearhouse, and Solda's Restaurant (The Express Grill, another restaurant in the former Orange Julius location, has recently closed), with all other businesses either relocating to the new Pacific Rim Centre or elsewhere in Port Alberni, or closing their doors altogether in some cases.

As of August 2006, the mall began undergoing complete refurbishing to turn it into a power centre similar to the neighboring Pacific Rim Centre. As part of the overhaul, Mark's Work Wearhouse will move into a new location (scheduled to open in April 2007) currently under construction beside Canadian Tire, on the site of the old Boots/Pharmasave and Peoples Jewellers locations in the mall's east end, which was the first part of the old mall to be torn down; the existing Safeway/Liquidation World space at the mall's west end will be renovated and divided into smaller retail spaces; and the remainder of the mall between the new Mark's Work Wearhouse and the former Safeway will be levelled for a parking lot and new retail buildings. The Source by Circuit City will close its Alberni Mall location on April 15, 2007 (to allow mall demolition and redevelopment to continue) and relocate to Pacific Rim Centre for a targeted reopening date of May 15, [1] while the future of Solda's is currently in the air.