Outdoor shopping centres within an established commercial Main Street can be a complicated to integrate over the long term. In the immediate term, with a local focus and a generally stable commercial base these “strip malls” can be an important contributor to a street, however their design is often antithetical to creating an active street due to surface parking. With the single-storey Eastview Plaza this is made more complex due to the large no-mans land between Montreal Road and the parking lot, the character of the south-side of Montreal Road in this area and the plaza acting as a terminus to Montreal Road at the Rideau River.

In the 1960s the plaza featured a full slate of retailers including Steinberg, Woolworth’s, Laura Secord and Reitman’s among others, similar to other outdoor plaza’s during this period including Westgate and Carlingwood. With shifting fortunes in the area and changes in the retail landscape many of these locally-focused plazas lost their major tenants to larger malls, stand alone locations or retail consolidation. In response to these realities common approaches included moving from an outdoor mall to a fully enclosed mall (Carlingwood, Westgate, Billings Bridge, etc) or employing a mixed retail strategy with less national retailers augmented with local or ethnically-focused retailers which are generally under-represented at the national level. For Eastview, the approach employed lately is a focus on ethnically-focused retail which has allowed the plaza to remain relevant in some measure.

Located on an oddly shaped site, the building is located at the back of the site with all of the street frontage occupied by parking (and a large vacant parcel). With a low scale it is challenging to create street activity, especially with the automobile domination between the Rideau River and the Vanier Parkway. This area was designed with with the car in mind in contrast with the character of Montreal Road east of the Vanier Parkway (former railway tracks), although even this portion of the street features a mixed bag of street frontage approaches.

Architecturally, the plaza still maintains interesting pieces, although some are obscured such as the barrel vaulted roof profile (partially obscurred) of the the large unit at the west end (former Steinberg), the large canopy of the large east end unit (former Woolworth’s) and the simple flat canopy that covers the walkway between them. As is common for building of this age, strategic editing is in order to highlight notable features while re-establishing a sense of baseline consistency within the built form. Walking from the parking lot side around the structure, a curious character is revealed. These elevations are otften short, possess some levels of visual interest or once featured secondary access points. The last point was most common along the west elevation, where some of these entries remain, but the streetscape is hurt by the backside nature of the street relative to the adjacent oversized office building.

Attempting to rejuvenate this property is complicated by the property layout itself, former gas station uses (removed and fenced off along the street) and the isolated character of the streetscape in the area. On a personal note I was surprised to find a parking ticket on my windshield after walking the site. Apparently there have been challenges with workers from the adjacent office building parking in the plaza lot and the use of a third party parking manager is viewed as a way to address this issue. An alternate narrative to this is the desire to maximize revenue within the property at whatever cost even potentially affecting the retail operations. It continues the themes present in this area with vacant storefronts, less than ideal businesses and the generally inhospitable character of the streetscape between the Rideau River and the Vanier Parkway.

Without serious and fundamental changes within the streetscape there is limited hope for improvement. This includes a shift in economic policies, transit priorities and redeveloping the former gas station site that fronts onto Montreal Road within the Eastview site. There are pieces that could generate positive development, however the current attitude of extracting maximum immediate benefit hinders this along with other factors.