From:
www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs...9048867839
_________________
Suburban smorg
Nov. 8, 2006. 06:24 AM
KIM HONEY
The heart of the Oakville Entertainment Centrum resembles a contrived village, like Whistler without mountains or Disneyland without rides.
Instead of stores or houses, there are restaurants painted various shades of pastel and primary colours, with contrasting awnings.
The bright red posts of the street lamps line no boulevards or avenues. Rather they beat a path to the 24-screen AMC theatre, a 95,000-square-foot behemoth that breaches from the concrete and dwarfs everything in its shadow. It is a place of such excess that not only is the Becel topping free, but you can pump it onto your popcorn yourself.
The neon AMC logo is the most prominent part of the centrum visible from the nearby Queen Elizabeth Way at Winston Churchill Blvd., where 125,000 cars whiz by each day. A Family Fitness centre occupies one corner, while the Putting Edge — a popular, glow-in-the-dark mini-putt spot for birthday parties — is tucked away off the pedestrian walkway.
There's a rare spot of green space smack dab in the centre, complete with mature trees and a small stream, volleyball courts and picnic tables. You can't see it from the vast parking lot, mainly because it's sunken, so far below street level it is positively subterranean. The four access gates are locked.
Neither shopping malls nor power centres, centrums — which have been popping up in suburban spaces from Kanata to Oakville in the past decade — are a strange hybrid of food and entertainment. They're like a plaza for the perpetually hungry and a smorgasbord for those starving for celluloid.
"It's sort of like a streetscape turned inside out in terms of the pedestrianization," says University of Toronto sociologist Joe Hermer, who has studied a movement called town centre management in British urban areas. "They're trying to co-opt the feeling of walking down a lively downtown street. The irony of it is you have to drive to it."
Hermer, a Toronto resident, has never heard of the centrum before, and neither have some of the students and colleagues he asks. "It sounds like an Oxford quad gone crazy," he quips, referring to the square of green space commonly found at the heart of university campuses.
Even after a recent lunch hour visit, he can't quite get a bead on it, saying it has a transient feel.
"These are spaces in which you don't do anything, but you travel through," he explains, pointing to the lack of benches or any common space where people could congregate. "They're sort of conduits for transportation."
In 2000, when the Town of Oakville conferred an urban design award on the centrum, the jury described it as "totally unusual and extraordinary," and noted the architects and developers were being recognized for using the pedestrian space as an organizing feature. The jury did feel the centrum could benefit from more trees "to reinforce the urban street character" and a more "animated" architectural design.
The outdoor entertainment complex is a modified version of an American phenomenon that developer PenEquity Management Corp. calls an "open-air lifestyle centre." (PenEquity's next project is the Metropolis, an indoor mall across from Dundas Square that will house a 24-screen AMC theatre and four restaurants.)
PenEquity coined the word centrum as a branding device, choosing the word to convey its vision of the outdoor plaza as a focal point for the region.
The U.S. concept originated in Dallas in 1995 when AMC Theatres opened its first 24-screen megaplex. For years, big cinemas had been relegated to the basements and back lots of shopping malls. But the megaplex, with 4,700 seats, demanded bigger space and a bigger population to draw from. The theatres became anchor tenants for large outdoor developments.
When AMC decided to expand into Canada in 1996, the chairman of PenEquity Management (an asset manager of pension funds) struck up a personal relationship with the theatre chain. That's how it became its developer of choice, according to PenEquity president and CEO David Johnston.
The idea was to entice moviegoers into repeat visits. PenEquity studied the Block at Orange in Los Angeles, which employs retail, food and entertainment venues as bait, though the theatre is the main draw.
By situating the Oakville development next to major highways, it allowed the theatre to cater to a region, rather than any one city. And so the Oakville Entertainment Centrum, which opened in 1998, attracts patrons from Burlington to the west, Mississauga to the east and Milton to the north.
The Kanata Centrum outside Ottawa, the largest in PenEquity's stable at 92 acres, looks the most like the American version, with a mix of retail and restaurants. The AMC theatre opened there in 1999. The Whitby Centrum opened the same year. And the Mississauga Centrum opened in 2001 at Hurontario St. and Courtney Park Dr.
But the locations in Canada, designed to draw in that regional crowd, weren't typically in areas zoned for retail. And so the Canadian version was born.
"You want to create a sense of place for the pedestrian," says Johnston. "You want to walk through the centre without feeling threatened by cars."
Indeed, it's something that is not lost on Oakville parent Christine Rzepecki. "Parents can drop their kids off and arrange to pick them up, and they've got so much money to spend. They can go to the movie and then get something to eat. What can they get into around here?"
Her family of five doesn't eat out often because it's expensive. But the kids love East Side Mario's, and she and her husband sometimes visit Tasty Thai.
The 32-acre Oakville site was further constrained by the "green space," otherwise known as a 100-year storm pond, so named because, once in a 100 years, there is a storm of such magnitude that it floods.
That's one of the reasons the site was available for development.
"It was something people couldn't work out," says Leger Xavier, PenEquity's vice-president of leasing and marketing. "We tried to use it as a feature." It's typically open in the summer, but it's locked off-season to prevent loitering.
Hermer describes the mix of uses as "a bit of a dog's breakfast ... trying to figure out what people want," but to PenEquity, it all makes perfect sense.
"The idea is not about working out and going to eat and then going to a movie," says Xavier. " ... It's about repeat visitation."
There are nine restaurants now, and only four — Tasty Thai, Crazy Sushi, Rosie McGee's Irish Pub and the Souvlaki Hut — are not chains. Boston Pizza, East Side Mario's and Alice Fazooli's have Italian food covered off, while Subway Sandwiches and Caffé Demetre, which offer lunch and brunch, round out the card.
Another big chain restaurant, the steak-and-rib joint Baton Rouge, is now under construction, and the Oakville institution Trattoria Timone is renovating the old Wolfgang Puck space right now.
PenEquity says it is trying to offer variety at different prices. And so you have the soccer teams trooping in to Boston Pizza on Sunday at lunch for pitchers of pop and slabs of pie, and office workers celebrating a colleague's birthday at the mid-range Italian eatery, Alice Fazooli's. The latter even offers Italian lessons over the speakers in the restrooms, while the waiter may recommend a glass of Australian shiraz or a Coor's Light in the same breath.
The same principle behind the multiplex theatre is at work. In other words, says Johnston, it's about choice: "If I go there with my family and I can't get into East Side Mario's, I can walk to Alice Fazooli's."After open-air entertainment complexes were built in the late '80s and early '90s, Johnston says they proved that offering more choice actually helps individual restaurants to bump up their sales.
That's what the upscale Trattoria Timone is banking on. Mike Fronteddu is moving his restaurant from Lakeshore Rd. E. to the centrum space and expects to open Feb. 1.
"I'm really pumped up about it," says Fronteddu.
His seating space will almost double, from 84 to 154, but a third of that will be devoted to a lounge, where he plans to cater to the pre- and post-theatre crowd with a smaller menu and wines by the glass. He's mulling over a children's menu, and is encouraged by feedback from regulars who work near the centrum and say they'd definitely go there for business lunches.
"There's a lot of restaurants there, but not high-end restaurants," the restaurateur says. As for the fact that Puck, Gordon Biersch and Café Tu Tu Tango all failed in the centrum, Fronteddu notes all three were owned by the same company. "There shouldn't be a reason why we don't succeed here. Unless we're not good and, in that case, that's what happens."
