History
Simpsons-Sears department store was opened in 1955. It was then a two-floor department store with 160,400 square feet (14,900 m2) of retail space.
Carlingwood opened in 1957 and offered 40 stores and was at the time the largest shopping centres in Ottawa. One of the selling points of the mall was its extensive 24 acres (97,000 m2) of free parking. Besides, Sears, one of the early stores to move into the mall was the established shoe store Armstrong & Richardson. Fairweather's, the clothing chain was also one of the earliest tenants and like Armstrong & Richardson is still in operation in Carlingwood.
In 1957, the Carlingwood Branch of the Ottawa Public Library opened in the mall, the first mall library in Canada. The branch later moved to a nearby custom-built facility in 1966.
In 2002 the management of the mall was criticised by CUPE, a labour union, for locking out cleaning staff who were part of the union in favour of non-union staff who received minimum wage and no benefits. The CUPE boycott of the mall ended with a victory for the union. Bill Murnighan, a writer for Our Times, used the dispute as an example of the "crossroads" that union organising faced in Canada at the beginning of the millennium.
Although the strike was directed at the shopping centre in the interest of gaining more publicity and having more impact, the cleaning staff were actually not employees of the shopping centre. The cleaning of the shopping centre is contracted out, and the cleaning staff were actually striking against the shopping centre to put pressure on their employer, Allans Maintenance.
Until July 2005 the Alex Dayton Seniors Activity Centre, co-founded by Ottawa Mayor Bob Chiarelli, was located near entrance three in the east side of the mall. For the 2007 Ontario election, the space was used as the office for provincial politician Jim Watson's re-election campaign.
The mall was renovated in the mid 2000's to add seating and other "comfort" improvements. In an interview with Ottawa Business Journal, former General Manager Denis Pelletier named the renovation as one of the reasons for the mall's successful 2005 Christmas shopping season, along with the mall's new bargain store, the Sears anchor, and easy customer access.
Read more about this topic: Carlingwood Mall
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