The idea of a self-sustaining community was indicative of “the post-war model for success: workers who earned a living wage, lived close to the industry that employed them, and made things that they then bought at the nearby shopping centre.” In Paul Moore’s “Movie Palaces on Downtown Main Streets: Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver” he notes the earlier connection between consumerism and amusement in the formation of Canadian urban identities. In 1954, when Scarborough officially became a borough of Toronto, Eglinton Square mall was also built to cater to the population which had now doubled to 100,000. As companies like Frigidaire, Thermos Canada, and General Motors settled into the area, it soon became “a huffing, humming hive of activity: Everything from pharmaceuticals and cosmetics to candies, paper products, typewriters and toys were being manufactured.” Naturally, mass housing followed as 10,000 homes were built in 1953 and the Golden Mile plaza was revealed the next spring to accommodate the new residents’ consumer needs and desires. Starting with the construction of General Electric Company of Ontario in 1941, an enormous manufacturing plant of munitions for the Canadian war effort, other businesses were soon enticed by promises of inexpensive land and low property taxes in the neighbourhood. The Golden Mile was at the forefront of this myth, as it became the gem of Scarborough during this period with the excitement of its development and its potential commercial prospects. Scarborough was at its cultural peak during the 1950s and ’60s, when its reputation grew as an attractive industrial and commercial hotspot in close proximity to the rest of Toronto. The “commercial jewel of a bustling Scarborough” : the emergence of the Golden Mile It is in the spirit of re-imagining Scarborough’s currently impoverished image, as advocated by such innovative groups as Think Tank Toronto, that this paper is written. As part of the earlier affluence of the “Golden Mile of Industry” which began during the mid-1950s and came to its demise at the end of the 1980s, the Golden Mile theatre is a symbol of Scarborough’s cultural rise and fall as a whole. More importantly, this paper aims to help reclaim Scarborough’s overlooked history by contributing to its largely unwritten scholarship. Theatres continue to quickly vanish off Toronto’s cultural map in the ongoing multiplex takeover. Since the neighbourhood has undergone a drastic transformation over the last 60 years, the Golden Mile theatre remains only as a memory of Toronto’s bygone cinemas. This paper seeks to address how the conversion from the Golden Mile to a Cineplex Odeon theatre reflects broader changes of film exhibition practices amidst the rise and current predominance of the multiplex. It is complete with all the staples of a one-stop shopping playground, including a Walmart supercentre, Canadian Tire, Old Navy, various restaurants and a 16 screen Cineplex Odeon theatre that serves as the centre’s anchor tenant. Today the hustle and bustle has moved east on Eglinton towards Warden Avenue, as the Eglinton Town Centre complex, where a General Motors van plant once stood, has now been replaced by a big-box consumer mecca which only keeps expanding. Most recently, developers have entertained turning the former plaza into condos. It is seen as a less appealing counterpart to the Eglinton Square mall, perched just across the street from the former Golden Mile plaza where businesses have steadily come and gone for decades. Since the Golden Mile plaza and theatre were demolished in the late 1980s, the Supercentre, which was erected in order to combat weak business in the area, has also been struggling to remain profitable given the current downturn in the economy. Instead of the Golden Mile Supercentre, whose main attractions are the No Frills and Everything for a Dollar stores, there was the luminous Golden Mile plaza, a fashionable outdoor strip mall whose approximately 50 tenants included such clothing stores as Eaton’s and Fairweather, as well as Canada’s first cinema in a shopping centre – a Famous Players single screen theatre appropriately named the Golden Mile. But Queen Elizabeth had visited Scarborough’s famous “Golden Mile of Industry,” a far different place from the neighbourhood that exists today. Looking at the run-down Golden Mile Supercentre mall on the north-east corner of Victoria Park and Eglinton at the border of North York and Scarborough, it is difficult to believe that the Queen herself once visited this spot back in 1959.
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