Mall Podcast #10: Crystal Mall
Burnaby’s mall culture, centred around Brentwood and Metrotown, hadn’t caught up to the region’s changing demographics — and then Crystal Mall happened.
The year was 2000, and across the street from the mighty Metrotown, something new was coming to the City of Burnaby.
By this point, Asian-oriented malls were very common and very popular in Richmond. Vancouver’s Chinatown was still a main centre of Chinese commerce in the region.
But Burnaby’s mall culture, centred around Brentwood and Metrotown, hadn’t caught up to the region’s changing demographics. Even with a famed planner and architect behind a new project, this plan for a new mall was raising eyebrows for all its unorthodox choices. Could it really work and compete with Metrotown?
Then it opened, and old assumptions were challenged. And a new reality crystallized.
Episode Guest: Vancouver writer and journalist Christopher Cheung.
(To read our essay and review of Crystal Mall, click here)
(To subscribe to the podcast, click here)
Theme music composed by Tom Whalen, www.echomenace.com