ESTEVAN - The Estevan Market Mall keeps renovating, changing and modernizing, and along the way it came up with a gift for the community.
A brand new, bright and packed with tools bicycle repair station is now available at the south side of the mall. The lot is equipped will all potentially needed accessories, stands to fix bicycles and a pump. The repair station is linked to Heritage Drive by a brand-new pedestrian pathway, also built by the mall and connecting the shopping centre to the city arteries. The bike repair station is free and available to the community all year round.
"It is something that starts to help us open up the south side. The mall has been here for almost 50 years and everybody thinks of everything coming from the north side, on King Street. And now that we've got the functional south side operating with all new accesses, we're going to start to revitalize that," said Martin Blair, managing director of First Aberdeen Properties Ltd., which owns the Estevan Market Mall. "We're going to look at actually having retailers that will have their face and their frontage on the south side."
The bicycle wheel came up along the development conversation lines and they decided to integrate it into different aspects of the upgraded facility. The location of the mall allows residents to drop their cars and just bike to the mall for a quick shopping trip on a nice day.
"We're going to probably bring some of that theme into our new food court that we're going to start construction on in the spring of next year, 2022, with the hope that food court will be ready for occupancy at the end of next year," Blair said.
While the bike wheel and its ease are symbolic of the upgraded mall, the market idea is also central to the revitalized facility.
"We got some great large retailers. Here we have Sobeys, we have Peavey Mart, we have Marks and Sport Chek and The Brick and all these kinds of good retailers, they're large. But I think a lot of our space now, as we have it come available, will be smaller retailers. Those smaller retailers tend to be local retailers. A hair salon, a nail salon, a baseball hat store, specialty shops," Blair said. "We are transitioning the inside of the mall to bring that kind of market feel and community aspect into it. We're going to start preparing to have smaller spaces, more like 1,000 square feet, maybe 1,100 square feet, where you can have that kind of specialized local retailer. And that's where we think this is going to be transitioning over the next few years."
The mall is an integral part of Estevan, and as the owners renovate an almost 50-year-old facility, they want it to be accessible from all sides and connected with the community.
"We've installed the connection path that brings the community walking paths system and the play area across into the south side of the mall. So it's just one step to help us interconnect it into the community," Blair said. "And the bike repair station is one of our contributions to that."
The plan is to develop the lot around the bike station and create a natural rest area.
"We do need to bring in some trees. And what we want to do is bring in some of these larger rocks, the ones that are more like, 'Hey, I can sit on it and have my lunch.' Instead of doing benches and all those kinds of maintenance things, we want to use a little bit of nature. So we'll just bring some nice boulders with a flat surface where you can have your lunch or just take a rest. We'll try and do that as we get into the spring weather," Blair said.
The south side now has a fully functional parking lot, which is accessible from the east and west sides. The building also has two functioning entrances on the south side.
"It's a good communication corridor from the north side to the south side. Whereas everybody was maybe approaching the Tim Hortons previously from King Street, either east or west, now a lot of people are finding that they can come in from their community on the south, and actually route through that new south approach up through the east side of the building and right at Tim Hortons," Blair noted.
Dollarama's storefront and sidewalk are now under construction with the rest of it to be finished in the spring, to ensure the store can keep operating as usual. Soon the work will begin in the food court, and then the main north entrance will be modernized.
It will be closed for some time to come back as a glassed open space with access to the food court from the outside.
Since First Aberdeen Properties Ltd. took over the mall, the new owners redid the storm system, changed the roof over Sobeys, rebuilt the parking lot in front of Peavey Mart as well as the storefront, and did some renovations inside, relocated Eclipse and started working on the future food court. They also upgraded the lighting to LED, developed the south side parking lot, created the south path and driveways along with the bike repair station, continued on with the storefront repair program going from east to west of the building and more.
