Alberni Mall

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Alberni Mall was an indoor shopping mall located in Port Alberni, British Columbia. Beginning in the fall of 2007, it will be reformatted as an outdoor shopping centre following renovation and redevelopment of the former mall complex, and will most likely also be renamed as part of its updating.

[edit] History

Alberni Mall in April 2008

Alberni Mall, located on the southeast corner of Johnston and Cherry Creek 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 approached dead mall status near the end of its function as an indoor mall as its tenant list dropped to just four businesses by the time of its closure—Canadian Tire, The Source by Circuit City, Mark's Work Wearhouse, and Solda's Restaurant, 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.

In August 2006, the mall began undergoing complete redevelopment to turn it into a power centre similar to the neighboring Pacific Rim Centre. As part of the overhaul, the site of the old Boots/Pharmasave and Peoples Jewellers locations in the mall's east end was the first part of the old mall to be torn down, to make way for a new location of Mark's Work Wearhouse beside Canadian Tire; the existing Safeway/Liquidation World space at the mall's west end will be renovated and divided into smaller retail spaces; and the front portion of the remainder of the mall between the new Mark's Work Wearhouse and the former Safeway will be levelled for a parking lot while the back portion is renovated for new retail space.

On April 15, 2007, the main part of the mall closed to allow demolition and renovations to resume as Mark's Work Wearhouse relocated to its new store, while The Source by Circuit City closed temporarily to prepare for relocation to its new Pacific Rim Centre location (which opened in early-July) and Solda's also temporarily closed while its owners prepared a new location for the restaurant. The first two new tenants for the mall as part of its revitalization arrived in late-2007 when the dollar store chain Dollar Giant opened for business in November, followed by Boston Pizza on December 28. Redevelopment of the old mall is expected to continue into 2008, as further renovations are currently on hold pending interest from other prospective new tenants.