Its architects were Eliasoph & Berkowitz of Montreal. Called Westgate Shopping Centre, it was located in an empty field at the corner of Carling Avenue and Merivale Road across the street from a drive-in cinema. Construction of Ottawa’s first suburban shopping began in mid-1954. The country’s first was the Royal Shopping Centre, located in West Vancouver in 1950. Suburban shopping malls also became popular in Canada. They also drew business away from downtown, contributing to the hollowing out of city centres. Suburban malls were often encircled by acres of asphalt parking lots, the very antithesis of what he had in mind. Unfortunately, the ensuing reality was often very different from Gruen’s dream. Americans flocked in droves to these new temples of commerce. He envisaged the shopping mall as the centre of suburban social and economic life.Įncouraged by favourable tax treatment, developers in the United States enthusiastically embraced the mall concept, constructing shopping centres across the country many were entirely enclosed and temperature controlled. Gruen, who is widely viewed as the father of the modern shopping mall, sought to replicate in the suburbs the public square found in old European cities. In 1952, Vienna-born architect and urban visionary Victor Gruen co-authored an article in the magazine Progressive Architecture outlining a better, more holistic approach. But suburban development was often haphazard and ugly. The first modern, suburban shopping mall is reputed to be the Bellevue Shopping Square which opened in 1946 in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle.
With growing affluence, increasingly mobile families turned their backs on the cramped, downtown, apartment lifestyles of their parents to pursue the middle-class dream of a detached home with a yard in the suburbs.īusinesses followed the migration. Factories, which had previously turned out war materiel, began fabricating cars and other durables that were in turn snapped up by eager consumers with money in their pockets. Private consumption, suppressed by government during the war years due to the demands of a war economy, took off. The birth rate, which had fallen during the Great Depression, rebounded with the return home of millions of soldiers, and rising economic prosperity. In the years following the end of World War II, North America experienced massive demographic and economic changes.
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