Scarborough Town Centre

Scarborough Town Centre opened in 1973 at the intersection of Highway 401 and McCowan Road, built as the commercial anchor of a broader plan to give Scarborough, then a rapidly growing but still largely suburban borough, a proper downtown core of its own. The mall was paired with the Scarborough Civic Centre, a striking curved municipal government building designed by architect Raymond Moriyama and completed in 1973, intended to house Scarborough's own local government before amalgamation eventually folded it into the wider City of Toronto.

A downtown that stayed mostly retail

While the mall itself grew into one of the largest shopping centres in the Toronto area, the broader vision of a dense, mixed-use "Scarborough City Centre" with substantial office and residential development around it took decades longer to materialize than originally planned, with the area functioning for a long time primarily as a large suburban retail hub rather than a genuine downtown. More recent redevelopment plans and the extension of transit lines toward the area have renewed efforts to build out the surrounding blocks with housing and offices, decades after the mall and civic centre first opened.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Scarborough
• Wikipedia — Scarborough Town Centre

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