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Sears Canada (1952-2017)

  • Thread starter CanadianNational
  • Start date
I could see CF buying out Sears' lease in Markville as well. That store is AWFUL in an otherwise greatly improving mall. If anyone really wants to go to Sears (unlikely), they can drive down McCowan to STC.
 
ILuvTO said:
As soon as you said "split vertically", that was the first vision that popped into my head, having two anchors side by side. But you are right, they could develop it any number of ways. As devjohnson said above, CF will probably redo the whole space. Sears leaving would be a huge opportunity for CF. :)
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Agreed. Let's all hope that they don't screw it up/do it on the cheap.
 
Ramako said:
Yup. Why not take the opportunity of a vacant space to build an office tower on top?
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The Eaton family built College Park in the late 1920s (opened in 1930 IIRC) as the first phase of a larger project including a tower, but they famously neglected to build the first phase in a manner that would support the weight of the tower.

I wonder what the next generation of the Eatons (actually, arguably the next two generations, as John David Eaton died when the Eaton Centre was still being planned) did with the Eaton Centre store. I wonder what would be involved in adding a tower. The store has a massive footprint, so some intensification would be nice (mind you, the original store before they started giving floors to Cadillac Fairview was approx. 1,000,000 sq. ft.).
 
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Skeezix said:
The Eaton family built College Park in the late 1920s (opened in 1930 IIRC) as the first phase of a larger project including a tower, but they famously neglected to build the first phase in a manner that would support the weight of the tower.

I wonder what the next generation of the Eatons (actually, arguably the next two generations, as John David Eaton died when the Eaton Centre was still being planned) did with the Eaton Centre store. I wonder what would be involved in adding a tower. The store has a massive footprint, so some intensification would be nice (mind you, the original store before they started giving floors to Cadillac Fairview was approx. 1,000,000 sq. ft.).
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I've never heard that the Foundations "famoulsy" were not strong enough to support the tower. I'm pretty sure it was the Great War and the Depression which did in the office building. From wikipedia: Nevertheless, foundation pillars, 10 feet in diameter, were driven 30 feet down into bedrock during the construction of the first phase to accommodate the tower.

The latter day eatons never had any vision beyond their horses, fast cars and georgian bay island...
 
Skeezix said:
The Eaton family built College Park in the late 1920s (opened in 1930 IIRC) as the first phase of a larger project including a tower, but they famously neglected to build the first phase in a manner that would support the weight of the tower.

I wonder what the next generation of the Eatons (actually, arguably the next two generations, as John David Eaton died when the Eaton Centre was still being planned) did with the Eaton Centre store. I wonder what would be involved in adding a tower. The store has a massive footprint, so some intensification would be nice (mind you, the original store before they started giving floors to Cadillac Fairview was approx. 1,000,000 sq. ft.).
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If the Sears at the Eaton Centre becomes a tower, it would be called Eaton Tower, not Sears Tower (yes, I know that the one in Chicago is now called the Willis Tower).
 
pw20 said:
I've never heard that the Foundations "famoulsy" were not strong enough to support the tower. I'm pretty sure it was the Great War and the Depression which did in the office building. From wikipedia: Nevertheless, foundation pillars, 10 feet in diameter, were driven 30 feet down into bedrock during the construction of the first phase to accommodate the tower.

The latter day eatons never had any vision beyond their horses, fast cars and georgian bay island...
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Sure, the Great Depression did the building in. But it would have been cost prohibitive to build it anyway. There is a whole discussion in the McQueen book about how the failure to allow for the future tower was one of the first signs of a family-run business that was not sufficiently engaged in planning for its future. When Eaton's went bankrupt decades later, the story about the tower was trotted out again a few times in the press.
 
Skeezix said:
The Eaton family built College Park in the late 1920s (opened in 1930 IIRC) as the first phase of a larger project including a tower, but they famously neglected to build the first phase in a manner that would support the weight of the tower.
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I'm not really sure that's accurate. The plans for the whole site show a pedastal (a little under 1/4 of which was actually built--the northeast quadrant) with the tower in the centre. The tower doesn't really "rest on" a significant portion of that pedastal.
 
Yes, we've all seen the renderings from the 1920s. And an apartment building addition was built towards the centre in the late 70s/early 80s. I'm not an engineer, and I have no idea what one would need to do to accommodate the full build out (either today or in the 1920/30s), but I will tell you that one of the reported failings of the Eaton family was that the first phase of the College Street store was not built with a structure necessary to support the proposed tower. Whether the story is apocryphal or not, it's been repeated enough times that it served my purposes above, which was to point out an interesting tidbit piece of Eaton's history (engineering analysis aside) when considering the possibility of adding a tower to the Eaton Centre store.
 
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