MC60 P000257 Aerial View of Fairview Park Mall, ca. 1970 (KPL Collection)
As ION heads towards Fairway station, our time travel journey goes back to the 1960s when the car was king and shopping was an event, worthy of dressing up in your best clothes.
Developed in Kitchener’s east end Parkway neighbourhood, Fairview Centre Park Mall provided a gateway to the city that promised shoppers a new retail heaven.
First proposed in 1962, the $8 million/50 store construction project was estimated to be completed in two phases and take several years to complete. The project was proclaimed to be the largest development in Twin City history.
The first phase contained an open mall connecting twenty stores, including a Zehrs supermarket, to a Simpson-Sears outlet which anchored the mall. It opened on Thursday 21 April 1966. The immense size of soon to be completed mall was described in a 19 April 1966 Record article as “shopping across five football fields with a few tennis courts thrown in for change”.
By mid-August 1967, Fairview Park was the second largest enclosed shopping centre in Ontario, after Toronto’s Yorkdale Mall. The second phase of the development was completed in August 1968 and included a Woolco store.
The mall has been renovated several times over the years. A major $33.4 million redevelopment in 2007 included a new food court, higher ceilings, and a refurbished parking lot. 2019 also marks another redevelopment for the mall, as it adapts to a changed retail landscape and shopping trends.
Fairview Park Mall has been a major Grand River Transit hub for bus service and is now the southern terminus for ION.
This may be the end of the line, but it won’t be the end of ION’s story as plans go ahead for connecting Cambridge.
Cheers, Karen
This is post 19 of 19 in the Stories That Move You series.
Stories that Move You is a Kitchener Public Library project that celebrates the launch of ION service with curated collections of reads, music, audio, learning resources, and local history to help people make the most of an unique window of time during their public transit ride.
Historically Speaking 