Mall Profile #17: Kingsgate Mall, by Cindy Masuch
Celebrated in song, beloved by the city, totally average in terms of stores inside: why do people love Kingsgate Mall so much?
Kingsgate Mall
Location: Vancouver
Opened: 1974
Approximate number of stores: 30
Anchor tenants: Save-On-Foods, Shoppers Drug Mart, BC Liquor
I went to an art exhibition to look for an answer.
The exhibition was Make-Believe Mall, this year’s instalment of the annual Tombolo children’s art show. It was children’s drawings of the contents of their own dream malls, and it was fittingly staged inside a mall itself. What did these kids think was important for a mall? The show had a lot of very cute pictures of talking cats and barista raccoons, but no direct answer to the question: why do people love Kingsgate Mall?
Kingsgate Mall was opened in 1974. Unusually, it is built on land still owned by the Vancouver School Board and is on a 99-year lease. The mall opened with a solid set of stores, with the Shoppers and the BC Liquor Store still in the mall today. Its form hasn't changed much over the decades, always having the symbiotic trio of a grocery store, a drug store, and a liquor store. They’re not gigantic (a la Central City) but they’re not tiny (a la City Square), getting the job done and bringing regular traffic to support all the other stores. I think that's kept the mall afloat during the rockier decades, even as all the other stores came and went.
Today in 2026, Kingsgate Mall doesn’t sound that interesting just from what’s inside. Besides those Three Sisters stores, there’s an assortment of midsized clothing stores covering basic needs: an Ardene, a Reitmans, and a Mark’s. There are stores that meet practical needs like a dentist, an insurance provider, a florist, a tailor under the stairs. There are a few establishments that are a bit less common in a mall: a furniture rental store, a vintage clothing store, a VR arcade. But nothing glamorous or high-fashion.
The mall itself, fitting in a single block with parking included, isn’t fancy architecturally either. It’s built into the sloping hill of Mount Pleasant, with the first floor level with Broadway and the second floor level with 10th. The grocery store is alone on that second floor, with its own parking lot and big direct entrance. There’s no grand escalator or atrium to connect the two floors, just an elevator and a staircase tucked away from the main concourse, and so the main floor of the mall feels a bit subterranean. That concourse, with entrances on the west and east sides, is where all the other stores of Kingsgate are. Some of the stores have exterior doors in their units, but they’ve been blocked off a while ago. The hallway is also designed in a way I think is clever: it does not connect directly to the other side but instead has a bit of a zig zag in the middle. This prevents a direct line of sight from one entrance to the other, making the mall feel bigger than it is. It also gives more focus to the space in the middle of the mall where there’s a lotto booth & small cafe. The interior feels neither cavernous nor cramped. The lighting is nice. It is a very satisfactory, very ordinary environment for shopping. I don't think a random visitor to Vancouver, one who doesn't know the local aura of Kingsgate, would think the mall is anything out of the ordinary.
One thing the mall is lacking is a food court. Kingsgate opened with a Mr Mike’s upstairs and an Orange Julius downstairs, but the restaurant has closed and the cafe has switched owners & themes several times. Right now it’s VT’s Cafe, serving samosas and chai along with coffee and pastries. A small but full food court would definitely bring in more traffic, but would be hard to fit into Kingsgate’s existing layout; major renovations or additions would be needed. So right now, it’s just the cafe counter, a few tables, and an indoor picket fence forming the dining area. That lone cafe isn't really a sufficient substitute for the usual mall food court, especially not the heights that some food courts reach in Richmond.
So, in summary: Kingsgate Mall has stores that fulfill a lot of practical needs, but nothing really exotic or unique. It doesn’t have buzzy brands or luxury goods. It doesn’t have an incredible food court. It definitely doesn’t have any of the fantastical stores of the art exhibit, like a hair salon for unicorns or a magic potions store.
So why does it have a whole fandom, then?
Why is this the mall that has multiple tribute songs, had a hugely popular in-character twitter account run by fans, has Kingsgate-branded not-officially-endorsed t-shirts sold at street festivals across the city, has somehow been the mall that people ask us about the most?
Kingsgate Mall had a downturn in image alongside all of Mount Pleasant in the 90s, as the area became seen as disreputable or dangerous. But mall management turned things around, hosting community groups and events in the mall and improving the environment with a major renovation at the turn of the millennium. And management stood up for the pride of Kingsgate and the surrounding neighbourhood: in 2001, a letter to the Vancouver Sun from the mall manager refuted the nickname of Hell’s Gate Mall, citing that renovation and all the community services they hosted. And over the next decades, the staff kept on working to make Kingsgate better. Leyda Molnar, the property manager for a time starting in 2006, even got an award from the Mount Pleasant Lions Club for the results.
As Olympic fever gripped Vancouver and gentrification washed over Mount Pleasant in the 2010s, Kingsgate Mall provided a venue for artistic endeavors like music festivals and fashion shows. The locally-famous tribute song to Kingsgate, set to Skyfall and now with almost 90 thousand views on Youtube, came out in 2015. The same year, writer Lonnie Nadler spent almost a full day in Kingsgate Mall and wrote about it for Vice. The title of the article: I Spent 18 Hours in Canada’s Strangest Mall. Both song and story featured the off-step goods at the mall's odd stores.
Today, most of those odd stores are gone: there's no oil painter under the stairs, no lobster rolls cafe, no gaudy high-heeled shoe store. Just a compact, respectable mall with standard, respectable stores. But Kingsgate has kept the community programs. In a vacant unit every Thursday, there’s a seniors group meeting in the day, and a drop-in crafting event in the evening. Each year at Christmas, the mall hosts a Giving Tree program. Requests for holiday gifts for people who can’t afford them are written on slips and hung on trees in the mall concourse, and people donate to provide them. The mall management still works directly with charities and community organizations to help out the neighbourhood, so I guess all the good will towards Kingsgate shouldn’t be surprising.
There’s been much legal conflict between the Vancouver School Board and the mall owners, Beedie Development about the annual rent of the property, especially since the value of the land went over a hundred million dollars a decade ago. But the drama of the court cases (and currently dropping property values) may have helped the mall avoid the current condo-development fate of Brentwood or Lougheed. Kingsgate, like the ancient crocodile, has stayed consistent as the world changed around it. It hasn’t chased the gaudy retail highs of Metrotown or Guildford, or reinvented itself to be attractive to wealthy tourists like Oakridge.
It’s stayed focused on where it is, and who needs it: Mount Pleasant.
I was chatting with the Make-Believe Mall curators at the door to the art show on my way out, when facility operator Glenn Anderson came by. We all discussed why people felt so attached to the mall, and Glenn said that Kingsgate wasn’t a shopping mall, it was a community mall.
A few months before the Tombolo show, Kingsgate Mall hosted another art exhibit: The Museum of Personal Failure. A vacant unit was packed with stories, art pieces, dioramas, videos and all sorts of material that told how people had experienced failures minor and major, comedic and tragic. I don't think there's another mall in the city that would host an art show like that. Most malls want to feel optimistic. They're advertising ideals of satisfaction through exciting big-name stores, buzzy products, social esteem, and effortless glamour. Kingsgate Mall is anti-glamour. It is beloved because it is real, because it has not changed and doesn’t want to. For all its rough edges, for surviving and succeeding with those rough edges, we celebrate it.
Long live the dream of Kingsgate Mall.
TOTAL SCORE
Small Stores: 6.5/10 (Between the vintage clothing store and the pop-ups, the Mark's and the Ardene, the dentist and the Zero Latency VR room, there's a pretty good mix of service, retail and entertainment-based options for a small space, even if there's nothing particularly exciting from a brand-name perspective)
Anchor Tenants: 4/10 (The standard grocery store/drug store/liquor store combo, all with good traffic and at the end of the mall for easy access. A shrug of the shoulders, but exactly what a neighbourhood mall requires)
Food Court: 1.3/10 (VT's Cafe isn't bad, but it isn't amazing either, and it's the only food option in Kingsgate. And while you could argue that 20% of these scores devoted to food is too much, it's been abundantly clear to us in this project that a good food court drives energy, is much more resistant to commercial trends, and can always make a mall better. That Kingsgate is too small to really accommodate a super large food court is undeniable, but only having one coffee stall is also a missed opportunity)
Design/Accessibility: 6.8/10 (Compact, straight line, the feel of a 70s brick tile and low ceiling outlet in all its glory, even if the tiles are a bit newer now and the lighting has improved. The split level and secret stairwell to Save-On-Foods is a bit confusing and it's never going to get points for modern flourishes, but it does the job well and at this point constitutes legitimate architectural heritage)
X-Factor: 9.3/10 (The entire selling point of Kingsgate Mall is that it's more than the sum of its parts: that a small 1970s neighbourhood mall in the heart of a global city continues to both exist in a time capsule *and* serve a genuine community need is a lovely statement on what malls can provide, and the spirit of Mt. Pleasant that manages to endure after seven waves of gentrification)
OVERALL: 28/50 (That doesn't make it an amazing mall though. Ultimately, Kingsgate is small and lacks a food court or any buzzy standout stores. But it serves its purpose pretty well, has a genuine community around it, and so gets a middle of the pack placement. Snark on it if you must, but we'd encourage you to get better hobbies.)
