PART IV: PRESENT DAY

Today, the mall has just over a dozen tenants. Though private consultants, public interest groups, local retailers and the City of Yellowknife have all made attempts to improve the space, the mall remains a shadow of what it was in its heyday.

Patrick Scott, owner of Birchwood Coffee Kǫ̀: The reality is, small businesses are really fighting to survive.... It's really, really tough to pay the overheads that you have to pay here and be viable with the volume of sales that you have. So it's … definitely not easy.

When we were looking at opening up [Birchwood Koffee Ko], we spent almost almost a year trying to rent space from the mall and couldn't get them to make a decision. They come up with conditions, we’d address their conditions and [still] couldn't get it.

I don't know whether they were serious about renting space, frankly. They had lots of reasons not to rent it rather than to rent it.

James Crozier, manager of Ogre’s Lair games shop in Centre Square: I would say about 90 per cent of the time, the people walking by are “streeters.”

You’ve got a population that doesn’t spend any money in the mall, and scares away people that can be spending in the mall. That’s a broad generalization, yes, but if you talk to normal people and ask why they don’t come downtown, they may not come downtown period because of the threat of it.

When I first got into the space, I told them that it was only a matter of time before I’d probably be in a physical altercation with somebody, because it’s just the way it is.

Shawnette McNeil, former mall manager: Everybody is going to use that as an excuse, but that has not changed.

I mean, I've been threatened, I've been chased, I've been hit, I've been spit on. You name it and it happened. I was chased around the elevator at the Yellowknife Inn with a broken beer bottle. It can get bad.

[But] that has always been here ... So instead of saying they're a stain, let's just start treating them like people again.

Adrian Bell, commercial real estate agent: A few years ago I would’ve said that it’s a place to see avoided. That you’re going to see a lot of fighting, it’s not going to be an enjoyable atmosphere — you probably don’t want to take your kids there.

It seems in the last couple of years that they’ve done some work to try to make it more welcoming.

It’s still empty. It’s not yet welcoming to retailers. And the shoppers don’t seem to have come back. But I don’t think it’s dangerous or anything like that.

Present Day: James Crozier, owner of the Ogre's Lair games shop in Centre Square, talks about some of the issues he sees in the mall every day.

Paco Underhill, mall expert: There were shopping malls that were prospering mightily in 1990 that by 2005 were less so and some of it was they weren't keeping up with the trends.



A shopping mall — and particularly one that exist in a downtown setting — needs to have a place-making component to it, which is evangelical.

[It may be] saying, ‘I have this vacant space. Is there a way for me to be more creative about how I use it?’ And that may be rather than going I'm looking for a tenant willing to sign a 10-year lease, I'm going to go in and reorder the space so that people can run pop-ups [or] open up a branch of the local farmers market there.

McNeil: Get back to community spirit. Go after the companies. Go after the mom and pop.

Even if they offered the guys a percentage-of-sales rent for a year and just get them to pay the maintenance costs and the operations, then you might see more people come down here.

There have been some improvements. This fall, the Santa Claus Parade once again filled Centre Square with life — a live concert, a public market, and families roaming the halls.

One week prior, the lower mall hosted the Far North Photo Festival, converting one of its biggest storefronts into a temporary gallery. It was the second time in a matter of months the property had been leased out to a non-profit on a short-term basis.

Pablo Saravanja, organizer with Far North Photo Festival: This gallery space was literally just a shell a few days ago. Some creative people came in, saw its potential, and thought, “Hey, this could also be a really great gallery space.”

I personally would love to see a … daycare in this building. I think families and kids walking through the space is going to brighten it completely. I think people gather where other people gather.

I’d love to see a Northwest Territories tourism office, right next to a municipal enforcement office … to send the message that, “hey, we’re here to help.”

A "For Lease" sign in Centre Square's upper mall. (Walter Strong/CBC)

Brian Bastable, property manager with Slate Asset Management, owner of the lower mall: We have no say in what the upper mall does … We’re just focusing on our mall.

We’ve invested significantly ... I’m not sure what other landlords are spending money on their assets, but we’ve basically cleaned it up, and it’s a much brighter, cleaner portion of the mall to walk through.

We’ve also upgraded security. Previous security turned a blind eye to some of the issues.

Felix Seiler, COO of Holloway Lodging Corporation, owner of the upper mall: We haven’t really invested a lot of money, because … our main focus is not just a mall, right?

We’re a hotel ownership and management company … Everything requires a cost-benefit [analysis].

Even with those improvements, could Centre Square ever return to its glory days?

Adrian Bell, commercial real estate agent: Well, no. It’s impossible that it could ever fill up, because so much retail space has been built on the other end of town, that there will never be a demand for that much vacant retail space in our city. It will never happen.

Ryan Silke, Yellowknife city historian: Certainly, the city has to be more proactive, since they were the ones that ultimately built this mall, they were the ones that pushed for it 30 years ago. So what is their role today in solving that? Legally, maybe there’s no… imperative for them to do anything. But I still think that it is on the city to make that work.

Paco Underhill, mall expert: There are A and B malls across North America that may be saveable. And there are a bunch of C and D malls that maybe we just need to dynamite and start over.

Recognize that retail is historically about birth, life, death, and compost.

Pablo Saravanja, organizer with Far North Photo Festival: Yellowknife is a winter city, [and] this mall is directly in the centre of it.

This place can transform our relationship to the downtown core. It needs to be occupied.

Children's toys in the centre of the lower mall, where a fountain once stood. (Walter Strong/CBC)