History
Midtown Plaza opened in 1969 as a single-level mall with approximately 60 stores, with its official grand opening occurring on July 30, 1970. Initially, the mall's anchor tenants were the department stores Sears Canada (then known as Simpson-Sears) - which actually opened for business in 1968, a year before the mall proper - and Eaton's, with Kresge's discount department store serving as a junior anchor. A Dominion grocery store and a branch of the Famous Players movie theatre chain were added to the mall in its early years - The Midtown Cinemas was a two screen theatre that operated from 1970-2000.
In the mid-1980s, Dominion closed its Saskatchewan locations and the space was used as special events show room for a time (best known for hosting extravagant Christmas season displays) before being renovated into a food court in the late 1980s; the redevelopment of this part of the mall sparked the full-scale renovation that resulted in the addition of a second floor in the early 1990s, as well as an alteration of the building's facade into a design based upon the lines of the original rail station.
On August 16, 1976, a one-ton piece of concrete fell off the side of the CN Towers, crashing into the mall below; the mall and the office block were subsequently closed for several days while engineers assessed the building's integrity.
The Eaton's store closed after that chain's collapse in the late 1990s and a few years later was replaced by The Bay, which vacated its five-storey location on 2nd Avenue North in favor of moving into the mall's two-storey (plus basement) site. The movie theatre closed in the late 1990s as well, and after standing unoccupied by a permanent tenant for a number of years, by the late 2000s a portion of the theatre location was taken up by smaller retailers and new washrooms for the adjacent food court; the rest of the space was demolished for additional parking.
In the early 1980s a small boutique-style shopping centre called Midtown Village opened adjacent to the west side of the mall on Idylwyld Drive. In 1989 it was purchased by Midtown Plaza but remained mostly vacant before being leased by Saskatchewan Property Management Corporation Community Services. It was demolished in 2007 and turned into additional mall parking. Another addition to the complex was the construction of a Toys "R" Us store in the late 1990s. This store is not physically connected to the mall, being built on a section of the plaza's south parking lot and separated from the mall by 20th Street, but is still considered part of Midtown Plaza.
For many years a passageway outside Eaton's connected the mall to the neighbouring Centennial Auditorium (now TCU Place). This has since been removed, although subsequent expansion of TCU Place has that building now physically touching Midtown Plaza's west side.
Read more about this topic: Midtown Plaza (Saskatoon)
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