Carlingwood Shopping Centre is shopping mall located in the
Carlingwood neighbourhood of
Ottawa,
Ontario
Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central C ...
, Canada. The mall opened in 1956 and was one of the city's first major shopping centres.
Since January 2021, it has been operated by Strathallen Property Management.
Description
Carlingwood Shopping Centre contains 100 stores and services on a single enclosed level. The interior hallways are laid out in a rectangle, with secondary branching halls from six entrances. Offices and services, including the management office, are located on a trim second level in the northwest corner of the building. There are also two small underground sections housing some discount stores and a gym (at one point a YMCA/YWCA). The mall houses a mix of chain and independent services including retail (
Ardene
Ardene ər-deen, är-deen is a family-owned value fashion retailer based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in the early 1980s, Ardene started as an accessories and jewelry retailer, and has since added clothing, shoes, brand collaborations an ...
,
Canadian Tire,
Dollarama
Dollarama is a Canadian dollar store retail chain headquartered in Montreal. Since 2009 it is Canada's largest retailer of items for five dollars or less. Dollarama has over 1400 stores and has a presence in every province of Canada; Ontario has ...
,
Rexall
Rexall was a chain of American drugstores, and the name of their store-branded products. The stores, having roots in the federation of United Drug Stores starting in 1903, licensed the Rexall brand name to as many as 12,000 drug stores across th ...
) food service (
A&W,
Dairy Queen
Dairy Queen (DQ) is an American chain of soft serve ice cream and fast food restaurants owned by International Dairy Queen, Inc. (a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway since 1998) which also owns Orange Julius, and formerly owned Karmelkorn and ...
,
Subway,
Tim Hortons
Tim Hortons Inc., commonly nicknamed Tim's, or Timmie's is a Canadian multinational coffeehouse and restaurant chain. Based in Toronto, Tim Hortons serves coffee, doughnuts, and other fast-food items. It is Canada's largest quick-service res ...
) and banking (
CIBC
The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC; french: Banque canadienne impériale de commerce) is a Canadian multinational banking and financial services corporation headquartered at CIBC Square in the Financial District of Toronto, Ontario. ...
,
RBC,
Scotiabank) with
Loblaws
Loblaws Inc. is a Canadian supermarket chain with stores located in the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan. Headquartered in Brampton, Ontario, Loblaws is a subsidiary of Loblaw Companies Limited, C ...
serving as the mall's
anchor tenant
In retail, an "anchor tenant", sometimes called an "anchor store", "draw tenant", or "key tenant", is a considerably larger tenant in a shopping mall, often a department store or retail chain. They are typically located at the ends of malls. W ...
.
The mall is situated at the corner of
Carling and
Woodroffe Avenues, about 1 km north of the
Highway 417. A 1996 survey found that 21% of shoppers used mass transit to travel to and from the mall despite being designed as an automobile destination.
The mall is served by
OC Transpo
OC Transpo, officially the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Transit Commission, is the public transit agency for the city of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It operates an integrated hub-and-spoke system including light metro, bus rapid transit, convention ...
routes 51, 85, 87, 153, 301, 303, 305.
History
In 1955, the
Simpsons-Sears
Sears Canada Inc. was a publicly-traded Canadian company affiliated with the American-based Sears department store chain. In operation from 1952 until January 14, 2018, and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, the company began as Simpsons-Sea ...
department store opened on the grounds of the present-day mall. It had two floors with retail space. The rest of the mall was constructed around Simpson-Sears over the next year, opening in 1956 as an "L"-shaped
strip mall
A strip mall, strip center or strip plaza is a type of shopping center common in North America where the stores are arranged in a row, with a sidewalk in front. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots in front. ...
. At the time, it was the largest shopping centre in Ottawa, with over 40 stores. One of the selling points of the mall was its extensive of parking space. The mall was enclosed in 1971, and a third storey was added to Sears at the end of the decade. In 1957, the Carlingwood Branch of the
Ottawa Public Library
The Ottawa Public Library (OPL; french: Bibliothèque publique d'Ottawa) is the library system of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The library was founded in 1906 with a donation from the Carnegie Foundation.
Services
* Information and reference ser ...
opened in the mall, the first mall library in Canada. The branch later moved to a nearby custom-built facility in 1966.
Carlingwood Shopping Centre was formerly the home of one of the oldest and smallest
Zellers
Zellers was a Canadian discount department retail chain and is currently a brand name owned by the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). Founded in 1931 in London, Ontario, in later decades it was based in Brampton, Ontario. Zellers was acquired by HBC ...
stores in Ottawa until the location closed in 1999. That same year, the mall's
Marks & Spencer
Marks and Spencer Group plc (commonly abbreviated to M&S and colloquially known as Marks's or Marks & Sparks) is a major British multinational retailer with headquarters in Paddington, London that specialises in selling clothing, beauty, home ...
store closed as well.
In 2002, the management of the mall was criticized by the
Canadian Union of Public Employees for locking out cleaning staff who were part of the union in favour of a non-union team who received
minimum wage and no benefits.
The CUPE boycott of the mall ended with a victory for the union.
Bill Murnighan, a writer for ''Our Times'', used the dispute as an example of the "crossroads" that union organizing faced in Canada at the beginning of the millennium.
Although the strike was directed at the shopping centre in the interest of gaining more publicity and having more impact, the cleaning staff were not employees of the shopping centre.
Carlingwood Shopping Centre was renovated the mid-2000s to add seating and other "comfort" improvements. In an interview with ''Ottawa Business Journal'', then-general manager Denis Pelletier named the renovation as one of the reasons for the mall's successful 2005
Christmas shopping
The economics of Christmas are significant because Christmas is typically a high-volume selling season for goods suppliers around the world. Sales increase dramatically as people purchase gifts, decorations, and supplies to celebrate. In the ...
season, along with the mall's bargain store, Sears, and easy customer access. There are upholstered benches in the four main passages capable of seating over 180 people. In addition, there are over 150 tables in the three refreshment areas, each with two or more seats. Both sitting and refreshment areas are decorated with planters containing trees or shrubs.
[Pelletier, Denis, quoted in ]
Until July 2005, the Alex Dayton Seniors Activity Centre, co-founded by Ottawa Mayor
Bob Chiarelli
Robert Chiarelli (born September 24, 1941) is a Canadian politician. He was a Liberal member in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario who served from 1987 to 1997 and again from 2010 to 2018 who represented the ridings of Ottawa West and Ottawa W ...
, was located near entrance three on the mall's east side. For the 2007 Ontario election, the space was used as the office for provincial politician
Jim Watson's re-election campaign.
On January 8, 2018, the Sears store closed after the company went bankrupt. This left Loblaws as the mall's only anchor tenant. Demolition of the former store took place from March to June 2019 and was ultimately replaced with a
Canadian Tire store (the largest location in the world) which opened on September 22, 2022.
Notes and references
External links
Carlingwood's site
{{Ottawa shopping centres
Shopping malls in Ottawa
Shopping malls established in 1956