Landmark retail site on Steeles Avenue remains undeveloped.
The site of The Landmark condo-retail shopping complex at Steeles Avenue and Middlefield Road area remains undeveloped.
Staff photo/DAN PEARCE
In 2005, buyers snapped up its 500 first-phase units in less than a month.
The Landmark broke ground two years later on the largest vacant space on Scarborough's Steeles Avenue, 42 acres at Middlefield Road.
Billed as "North America's largest" condominium-style shopping mall, it would, supporters said, make people forget the Asian restaurants and stores of Toronto's Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue.
By November 2011, though, owner Landmark (Canada) Inc.'s numbered development corporation has lost its financing, regained it, and after filling out a second level to boost its store units to 1,000, was in receivership. An Ontario Superior Court judge ruled Landmark's position that it could pay off six mortgages and resume development "unsustainable."
"Unfortunately, the timing wasn't right," Landmark (Canada) CEO Terry Liu concluded in an interview after the site was sold to The Landmark's former contractor, Markham-based Mady Developments.
It wasn't clear to Liu if Landmark will be involved in running a mall Mady builds.
"No one knows, because that's the future," he said. "First, they have to decide if that's the product that they want."
The Landmark isn't the only Scarborough condo mall project to announce itself in 2007, only to flounder when a recession made banks tighten purse strings.
Splendid China 2, a 600-unit expansion of a standing mall east of Kennedy Road and The Sitara, promising 550 units catering to South Asian customers at Markham Road and McNicoll Avenue, are stalled too.
The three Scarborough projects have had to contend with some equally-ambitious mall proposals across Steeles in Markham, as well as with each other.
A new 800,000-square-foot Remington Centre is slated to replace Market Village on the north side of the road at Kennedy, alongside an expanded Pacific Mall. The combination, given the Town of Markham's endorsement last June, threatens to make the area's acute traffic congestion worse.
While finishing off work on another Markham mall, South Unionville Square on Kennedy Road north of Hwy. 407, Mady CEO Charles Mady said he's "anxious to get things moving" and submit an application for The Landmark site.
It will arrive "momentarily" and be "reasonably similar" to The Landmark plan, with strip retail along Steeles, a 200,000-square-foot open plaza and an indoor mall "a little smaller" than the previous project, he said last week.
Though Asian-themed, The Landmark tried positioning itself for non-Asian shoppers with English signs and cross-cultural appeal.
Mady's mall would offer "more of a diversity" in tenants as well as being "more exciting, really more of a draw," he said, adding, "I'd like to have it anchored by a supermarket" as the Unionville mall is.
Mady has to "look and see what the market will bear," Scarborough-Rouge River Councillor Chin Lee said recently. "I hope that they come forward and start building."
Long delays for Scarborough mall projects have kept two community centre expansions from going ahead.
The Landmark pledged $1.8 million for Milliken Park Community Centre on McCowan Road. "I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I've been looking forward to it for the last five years," Lee said.
The mall's former developers also donated a unit, auctioned for $250,000 by the Yee Hong Community Wellness Foundation and promised a $250,000 public "art garden" as well as to spend $1 million to "adaptively reuse" parts of two 19th Century heritage homes, the Underwood and William Stonehouse houses, in the mall.
Mady would be bound by the same obligation to preserve the vacant historic houses, though they could be moved off the property if the city agrees.
The Sitara would pay another $400,000 towards the Milliken facility and $100,000 for public art.
Splendid China 2 would pay the cost of a 5,000-square-foot expansion of the L'Amoreaux Community Centre, plus $60,000 worth of speed humps, to slow traffic, in Heathwood, the neighbourhood to the south.
The expansion, whose name, "The Great Leap Forward" oddly matches a disastrous agricultural program that caused millions of Chinese to starve, was declared in 2007 by developer Sheldon Esbin to be only the next stage in building on the land beside a GO Transit station on Steeles.
"It will not end with malls," he said. "It will continue with hotels, with apartments, with residential."
Construction, apparently due to a loss of financing, never got underway. The project retrenched and broke ground - symbolically, at least - in July 2010, but has been quiet since.
Splendid China 2 is "going through an ownership change" because of internal divisions and its application will be dormant until that is completed, said Mike Del Grande, the local councillor.
"The economy didn't help," added Del Grande, but said he was confident Splendid China 2 will go ahead again.
Current partners in the project could not be found for an interview, but last week Paul Jone, an real estate agent, said the ownership hasn't changed, and construction will start when the project has enough financing to continue.
"It's a race for density," said Del Grande, who is not part of a joint transportation task force between Markham and Toronto which will deal with the area's thorny traffic issues, for which a system of ramps and tunnels is proposed.
"Better co-operation would have been good for both sides of the street," said Del Grande.
President and landowner David Lam, meanwhile, has been silent on his plans for The Sitara following a 2009 message assuring investors his plans for a three-storey mall and convention centre were "very much in the pipeline" and that "the day is not far off, with the project proceeding slowly, yet surely."
In January 2010, a blog entry predicted a ground breaking in the "early" part of that year.
Market conditions for such developments, Lee noted, are beyond the city's control. "We can only lay the foundation for making it happen."