Yup, it's a big box, all right

Coming to Leslieville

Yup, it's a big box, all right

via Posted Toronto by Peter Kuitenbrouwer on 5/22/08

Smart!Centres, based in Vaughan, is Canada's busiest retail developer; its "big-box" shopping malls have become commonplace on the outskirts of most Canadian cities. The company has run into opposition in Leslieville of late with its plan for a 700,000 square-foot project, with parking for on Eastern Avenue. The city turned them down, and the company's appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board began on Wednesday.
As part of its intense lobbying efforts to win support for its plan, Smart!Centres has bought advertising in many local newspapers showing sketches of its proposed Eastern project, with three-storey red brick buildings and pedestrians and cyclists out front. The company introduced those sketches during its opening statement at the hearing yesterday. The other day, Tom Smith, the company's vice-president of development, argued in the National Post that, "Smart!Centres has done a lot of traditional greenfield 905 big box retail. We are changing the company from within."
But, should the company win its appeal at the OMB, will the project it builds reflect its sketches? The office of Councillor Paula Fletcher (Toronto-Danforth) the other day forwarded a sketch Smart!Centres produced for a project, including a Wal-Mart, at Bathurst and Centre streets in its very own Vaughan, along with a photograph of what actually got built. Absent, in the mostly finished project, are the cobblestones walkways, grass, plazas in front of the stores, lamp posts, and awnings from the sketches. There are a few spindly trees. Councillor Paula Fletcher comments, "The pedestrian features seem to have been lost from the concept drawings to the real thing." Brendan O'Callaghan, the lawyer leading the city's fight at the OMB, says that the Smart!Centre sketches, in the Leslieville case, are irrelevant. "This hearing is not about trying to make a Smart!Centre look like a business campus," he said. The city, he said, wants a "modern business campus for knowledge industries" at the site, along the lines of Liberty Village.