Fairview Park Mall - Grand Market District

[ijmorlan]

Malls are increasingly becoming less relevant compared to places like the Boardwalk; I suspect that this is a move to raise the profile of Fairview and help to define a more distinctive and marketable identity for the place to prospective tenants.

“Places like the Boardwalk”; meaning shockingly poorly designed malls that have the same disconnection from the neighbourhood and other nearby commercial properties as places like Conestoga Mall or Fairview Mall, but don’t even have the ability to walk between the various merchants in a protected environment?

I will never understand why people think that the requirement to get rained on when walking from one store to another is a plus.

I would have built the Boardwalk as one enormous building fronting directly on Ira Needles running from Thorndale to Glasgow, with a passthrough to allow a vehicle entrance at University (future extension all the way to Erb). The space behind would be parking. So people could enter from the Ira Needles side on foot or from a bicycle, or from the landfill side from a vehicle. At quiet times they would use the parking spots right behind the building, while at busier times most people would have to use the parking further away (simply due to the close spots already being full).

In the future, if personal vehicle use declines, the parking lot could be progressively replaced by a duplicate building separated from the existing building by courtyards and linked by breezeways or enclosed passages.