The whirl of the blender at Real Fruit Bubble Tea intermittently drowns out the din of conversation in the East York Town Centre’s airy food court. It’s a busy place. People nurse coffee they brought over from the Tim Hortons that always seems to have a line-up by the mall entrance. Others eat food out of styrofoam containers from Chester Fried Chicken or Kandahar Kabab. The joyous shrieks of kids streaming in from the elementary school next door, the largest in North America, gives the bubble tea blender a run for who’s loudest. There’s lots of lingering; it’s a place to meet up and see who’s about, a place where nobody moves you along if you aren’t consuming something at all times.

A typical mid-sized, mid-century Canadian mall with shiny floor tiles in 1970s shades of brown, acoustic paneled ceilings, and fluorescent lights, East York Town Centre is well-worn and hasn’t been updated much. Nevertheless, the mall has become Thorncliffe Park’s de facto town square. “I think East York Centre is the one of the essential parts of the neighbourhood,” says Sabina Ali, chair and one of the founders of the Thorncliffe Park Women’s Committee. “It is like a recreation space, especially for the seniors.” There are indoor walking groups for seniors and women. During cold winters, parents pick their kids up from school and bring them to the mall, feeding them meals brought from home. Recently, Ali says, a fire in the mall shut it down for more than a week, leaving Thorncliffe residents without a place to gather. “It’s a really important place to meet with friends and neighbours and spend quality time talking while having a coffee or some food,” she says.

The mall’s draw as a social space isn’t a new phenomenon: for decades the Thorncliffe Bowlerama was a near-perfectly preserved subterranean recreation lair with both 5 and 10 pin bowling lanes and a bar in the middle. Throughout its history, discount department stores have acted as anchor tenants — the kind of big retailers malls covet, not only because they’re a draw unto themselves, but also because two or more anchors draw people between them, increasing circulation, browsing and spending. Sayvette, a now defunct Canadian discount department store, handed the discount baton to Woolco in the mid-seventies. That space later became a Zellers. And in 2013, the mall got an injection of retail star power when Target moved in, part of the American chain’s much-heralded expansion into Canada.

Malls like East York, with their varying mix of independent retailers and chains, are found all around Toronto. Eglinton Square in Scarborough, Sheridan and Centrepoint malls in North York, Albion Mall in Etobicoke, Lawrence Square, and the soon to be demolished Galleria Mall in the old City of Toronto all play similar rolls in their communities. When Target announced the closure of all their Canadian stores in 2015, however, many malls were left with enormous holes in their floor plans to fill. At East York, the upper two floors of a key anchor space were left empty. Then in 2016 the Bowlerama closed its doors too. Coupled with a new Costco big box retail location that has opened across the street, drawing more people away, the future of the mall might seem like it’s part of the “dying mall” phenomenon occurring across the United States, where once-prosperous malls have lost their anchor tenants, starving smaller stores of a critical mass of shoppers.

“People are coming to the mall anyway, to socialize and to shop, so why not bring all those services under one roof?”

At East York, the cheaper rents have allowed independent mom-and-pop shops to flourish, businesses that couldn’t afford the overhead of Toronto’s high rent main streets and more prosperous malls. In the tech industry this kind of space is sometimes called an “incubator” for innovative “start up” businesses, but here it happens under the radar of the rest of the city. But while the small spaces are ideal for individual ventures, vast anchor spaces are harder to fill. A Dollarama eventually moved into some of the main floor space, keeping the discount retail tradition alive, as did an A&W franchise, but there was still more space to fill. Enter the Flemington Health Centre (FHC) and The Neighbourhood Organization (TNO), two health and social service agencies that saw an opportunity to serve local residents in the languishing retail space.

“Maybe 5 or 6 years ago there was a recognition in the Thorncliffe community that there was a lack of comprehensive primary care,” says John Elliot, Executive Director of the FHC. Health care in the community was scattershot: there were physicians at walk-in clinics treating people, and others operating at independent offices, but nothing that looked after the long-term health of the community as whole, no central place that would promote social and physical health and illness prevention in the community as much as treating colds and pulled muscles. Since everyone was already at the mall, it was a natural place for a hub where all of this could be centralized and coordinated: a one stop shop for getting better and staying healthy.

Shopping and health care may not seem like natural partners, and a project on this scale hasn’t been tried in Toronto before. Can the hub, a blossoming public institution establishing itself in a privately run, for-profit retail environment, become the stable anchor the mall needs to carry on its role as Thorncliffe’s unofficial town square? More importantly, can this unique partnership help make the community a healthier place?