Mall Profile #11: Denman Place, by Steve Masuch
There is no reason to go to Denman Place Mall if you aren’t already part of the neighborhood. But if you live in the West End, it is a gift of ultimate convenience and support.
Denman Place Mall
Location: Vancouver
Opened: 1969
Approximate number of stores: 30
Anchor tenants: Dollarama, No Frills, Shoppers Drug Mart
Down in the West End, right between Davie and Robson on Denman Street, is Denman Place. It’s a 35 storey apartment tower (though was a hotel for much of its life), with a half-block-sized mall at the base. It’s mainly concrete, painted a tan-brown colour, and doesn’t stand out in the neighbourhood. With external entrances to the Shoppers, Dollarama, and liquor stores, a lot of patrons might not need to ever go into the mall proper.
1967: To support the planned 37 floors of apartments and stores, three miles of steel columns are driven through the clay and into the sandstone bedrock.
The tiles in the hallways of Denman Place Mall look original. It’s from a time before the large cream-white tiles of the 1980s and 90s. It’s a reddish brown, and it’s been here for 57 years. The colour of them, along with the echoing acoustics, remind me of being at an old indoor community pool.
The interior of the mall is shaped like a squat T, with an entrance at each end. On the left side of the T, there’s the No Frills and the Shoppers. On the right, there’s the descent down to the basement Dollarama, and a cafe serving Japanese food. At the base of the T, there’s the Burger King and a glasses store. There’s a little tiny second floor, but it only has access to the parking lots and a vacant restaurant space. This is a very compact mall.
1969: Denman Place opens, with an incomplete selection of stores. People shrug, and the building doesn’t do much to change the course of the development in West End, or Vancouver in general. Time goes by.
I’ve been working on a theory about small malls like Denman. If they have a Three Sisters setup of three particular types of stores, they have a rock-solid financial base of recurring customers that ensures the mall will never truly die. The three stores are: grocery store, liquor store, drug store. Denman Place has all three (No Frills, Shoppers, and an outpost of Glacier Liquor), and so has a deep economic grounding to go with its physical one.
1982: The Ping Pong Ice Cream Parlour, a fancy ice cream store with architecture & design by Bruno Freschi, serves scoops out of their new Denman Place location. Ice cream goes well with sunset walks along English Bay beach.
Now, I’m not saying that a mall is only steady if it has these three stores. I can think of a few malls we’ve already looked at that don’t have that combo. Our current number one doesn’t! But in a smaller mall, there isn’t the space for a wide assortment of niche stores or giant anchor tenants to bring in customers. It needs to be focused on common daily retail needs to really get that traffic. City Square mall has that combo, even though the drug and liquor stores are pretty small. Kingsgate has it. And Denman has it too, with all three plenty large in size, and the mall has been steady for decades.
2012: At Denman Place Cinemas, I watch the Back to the Future trilogy with a crowd of people who came to celebrate the last day of the underground movie theatre. This is still a time when those movies had a part that was in our future.
The other, smaller stores in the mall are mainly service and utilities: glasses, passport photos, tailor, locksmith, barber, and so on. The large Dollarama gives a lot more answers to people’s immediate needs, where they just need to purchase an item fast and cheap. It’s a bit odd that in a neighbourhood trying to draw in tourists, there’s no kitschy souvenir store. Maybe that’s a measure of how the stores here focus on the people who live here, not on the people who visit.
2192: Among the flooded tower-islands of the West-Enders, the top of Denman Place is the largest market around. Fishers come to swap their catches for the best barter that people can give them. Divers still go deep underwater to look for any last cans undiscovered in the toppled shelves of Denman Beer Wine & Spirits. With the brightly-coloured tarps overtop the roof, Denman Place looks from above like a brilliant bunch of flowers, small boats and kayaks darting around it like hummingbirds.
Beyond the business needs of the neighbourhood residents, there’s direct community services here too. The West End Seniors’ Network runs a thrift store with some pretty good finds, as well as operating an office to give support for the many seniors that live around the mall. And the Member of Parliament for Vancouver Centre, the Honourable Hedy Fry, has held her office here for decades. There’s a lovely classic cork community bulletin board, with notices pinned for swimming lessons.
30,721: Crabs with fluted ruby shells a meter wide walk through the drained hallways of Denman Place. Their claws clack in metronomic harmony. They move like cars taught to ballet dance. They’ve brought some driftwood branches into the centre and built a shaky ladder up to the second floor, right next to the existing stairs. They race each other up the two ways to the second floor balcony, jump off the edge to fall to the floor in thunderous clattering, and do it over and over again.
Even the things that were once notable and exciting here have been filtered out. The Three Greenhorns bar, a fine dining restaurant with jazz music and Polynesian cocktails, closed in 1992 after over 25 years. The bright neon of the Ping Pong ice cream parlour came in the 80s and left in the 90s. More recently (in the time I lived nearby), the lascivious thrills of the Topdrawers underwear store, from jockstraps to harnesses to frankly tacky beach shirts, was once in Denman Place, but has since moved to another location. The most spectacular attraction, the underground movie theatre, has been gone for 14 years. This isn’t a mall for excitement.
25,000,000: Unearthed after a long cycle of sedimentary burial and volcanic heating and geological metamorphosis, nature has changed the concrete of Denman Place to glass. It stands in the forest, a crystal tower thirty-five stories tall. Amber light comes in like a cathedral. No animals can be heard in the grotto of the Shoppers Drug Mart. Giant ferns grow in every room of the tower, brushing at the sunlit walls with folded leaves like hands in prayer.
There is nothing grand in Denman Place Mall, nothing aspirational. There is simplicity. Like the tides washing a rough stone smooth over many years, time has worn the glitzy aspirations of an up-and-coming city — when the mall opened, the mayor said the area could become Vancouver's Manhattan — down to the daily needs of the quiet parts of the neighbourhood around Denman. There is no reason to go to Denman Place Mall if you aren’t already part of the neighborhood. But if you live in the West End, it is a gift of ultimate convenience and support.
80,000,000,000,000: The earth, the universe, all things, are now a light fog everywhere, fading apart. As the last wisps of particles untie from each other, releasing existence to fall back into nothingness, the office of The Honourable Hedy Fry finally closes its doors in Denman Place Mall.
TOTAL SCORE
Small Stores: 4.2/10 (25 or so smaller community-based stores that will take your passport photos and repair your clothes, but the small spaces limit opportunities, and the retail options ultimately lack anything of excitement.)
Anchor Tenants: 3.8/10 (Per the "Three Sisters" theory, a liquor store/grocery store/drug store is important base for a mall, and Denman has that and a Dollarama, but one wishes for more variety.)
Food Court: 1.5/10 (A food court isn't worth 20% of our score purely for the food, but because it gives the most energy and ability to hang out in a way that gives malls that that third space gravitas...and Denman doesn't have it. But we would be remiss not to mention 93 Coffee, a Japanese cafe with some great Omurice and Donburi options. The only other option in the mall is a Burger King. It's a Burger King.)
Design/Accessibility: 4.3/10 (The basic T-shape is serviceable, but the mall is inaccessible on one side, poorly lit, with the only place to stop and sit a paltry two tables controlled by the BC Lotto Corporation that was the first time in this series that we were hassled by staff to leave a place.)
X-Factor: 4.2/10 (You'll notice a lot of 3s and 4s in this ranking! It's indicative of a place that we wanted to appreciate more, and certainly has all the elements of a mall that you need, but ultimately never left us endorsing any particular facet of it.)
OVERALL: 18/50 (Some mall has to be the worst, and this is at the bottom of the ones we've ranked so far. If it had a basic food court, you could argue for a higher place, but without it you can only recommend in the context of living in the neighbourhood and using the services because that's where they're located.)