Toronto is booming , or so our mayor often says, but there are some parts of the city that have managed to avoid this boom, like Yorkville’s Cumberland Terrace, conspicuously located at Yonge and Bloor, crossroads of the universe. In the heart of Toronto’s most fashionable district, it’s dying mall sitting on some of the most expensive real estate in the country.

The thing about fashion is it can be very cruel and requires an enormous amount of effort to keep up, whether our wardrobe or retail decor. Cumberland Terrace has never been fully renovated so it remains an amazing museum dedicated to 1974, the year it opened, its Quaalude-cool tiles with geometric patterns in green, blue, yellow, orange, and brown the last stand of an earth-toned, Fleetwood Mac-soft-rock style.

Most curious are the clusters of operational pay phones, found in groups of four or even six. It’s reminiscent of phone banks in courthouses and other public buildings in the 1940s and 1950s, when members of the press would all rush into phone booths to dictate their breaking stories to their editors at once.

The three floors of Cumberland Terrace run along Cumberland Ave. from Yonge to Bay. The two above ground floors are behind glass windows 25-feet (more than 7.5 metres) high, affording a climate-controlled view of an entire Yorkville block. The upper floor is nearly empty but for some nondescript offices and a language school. The plants here are still being watered, growing in wooden planters attached to benches that were familiar sights in so many 1970s-era malls.

Found behind Holt Renfrew and Bloor St., connecting passages take you back a few decades to a retailscape that doesn’t much exist downtown now. Cumberland is the last stand for non-chic-boutique mom and pop stores in Yorkville. On the main floor, lunchtime crowds line up at Queen of Soups, Salad Days, and the Little Hut Cafe with its Canadian and Swiss flags painted on the menu. Another vestige of the recent past is the Song & Script music store, selling CDs and sheet music behind music notes painted on glass doors.

The downstairs food court is not like most other food courts that contain the same repeating franchises. Instead there’s a mix of a few older, corporate chains leftover from 1980s foodcourts such as Manchu Wok and Made in Japan: A Teriyaki Experience, as well as inexpensive, independent places, such as Roasty Jack Cafe which boasts a “comfort food experience” and “take home solution.” ESL students, suited up business folk, and workers from nearby construction sites congregate here, eating from Styrofoam containers while feeling the Bloor subway rumble under foot. With connections to two subways stations, Manulife Centre, and the Hudson Bay Centre via underground tunnels, Cumberland Terrace is a mini-PATH system.

Wish Cumberland Terrace — a taste of post-hippy pre-Botox Yorkville — a happy 40th birthday while you can, as there are delayed plans to redevelop all this with two condo towers and newer, shinier retail. The three floors of fun Cumberland offered don’t maximize this expensive land, so the owners didn’t bother reinvesting in it, inadvertently preserving a design with a lot of style. Middle-aged and out of fashion, Cumberland Terrace doesn’t stand a chance.

Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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