Hume: Bookstore's vibe didn't fit suburb
Published On Thu Dec 31 2009
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/744435--hume-bookstore-s-vibe-didn-t-fit-suburb
If it wasn't the wrong place, it was definitely the wrong time.
Though many were clearly taken with the idea of an independent bookstore opening at "Ontario's first outdoor lifestyle centre," it was not to be.
This week's closure of the McNally Robinson store just seven months after it opened at Don Mills and Lawrence is a reminder that you can keep context out of a mall, but you can't keep a mall out of its context.
Even in the best of times and locations, bookstores have a hard go of it; the list of casualties was long even before this week's bad news. In addition to McNally Robinson, there was Pages Books, David Mirvish Books, and who could forget the venerable Britnell's on Yonge, just north of Bloor. It closed a decade ago, its former premises now occupied by Starbucks.
Though McNally Robinson was little known in these parts, the Winnipeg-based outfit created one of those ideal bookstores that everyone swears they'd love to have down the road. Authors gave readings and signed books, while the in-house café served espressos and latte. It was the epitome of laid-back urban sophistication.
The only problem was that Don Mills and Lawrence isn't that sort of neighbourhood. It has an aging population that from the start was dead-set against the idea of tearing down the old 1960s mall and replacing it with a newfangled retail configuration that emphasized "experience" over convenience.
Narrow shop-lined streets organized around a skating rink were assumed to be preferable to the generic spaces of the traditional covered mall. Instead, it turned out that all those pioneering suburbanites remain committed to the original (though now much altered) vision of Canada's first planned community. They weren't embarrassed to admit they much preferred the older mall, even if it was an enormous shop-filled box. It wasn't much to look at, but it was warm in winter and cool in summer. At the same time, it was familiar, part of the routine.
In fact, Don Mills Centre has been in trouble since 1970, when Fairview Mall opened nearby. It lurched along for a couple of decades until a new scheme started to take shape several years ago.
The thinking behind it accepted that this is an area in transition, that what had been planned and built as a suburb was fast becoming more urban. True, public transit around the area still isn't terrific, but densities are much greater than first conceived and are about to get much greater as more condos pop up.
Maybe in a decade or so the neighbourhood will be able to support a McNally Robinson, but other factors such as the Internet and large chains are also at play. At the same time, the retail landscape of suburbia now includes power centres, big-box outlets, regional malls, the whole panoply of the park-'n'-shop lifestyle.
Perhaps the very notion of the "lifestyle centre" is irrelevant in a society long accustomed to the banality that accompanies convenience. The parking lots, line-ups, food courts and highways on which they depend have grown as invisible as they are inevitable.
Perhaps a project such as Don Mills smacks a bit too much of gentrification to please suburban sensibilities. Urban planners talk endlessly about revitalizing neighbourhoods with cafés, farmers' markets, pedestrian walkways and the like, but many Torontonians would rather drive, thank you very much.
In time they will be thrilled to be able to shop at the corner store. When that day arrives, "lifestyle centres" will be a thing of the past, and so will their cars.
