Billings Bridge Plaza
 |
|
| Location |
2277 Riverside Drive East Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1H 7X6 |
|---|---|
| Opening date | October 1954 |
| Management | 20 VIC Management Inc. |
| Owner | Capital City Shopping Centre Ltd. |
| No. of stores and services | 87 |
| No. of anchor tenants | 2 |
| Total retail floor area | 488,000 sq ft or 45,300 m2 |
| No. of floors | 2 |
| Parking | 1341 spaces |
The Billings Bridge Centre is a shopping centre located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is a medium-sized community mall with about 90 stores. Roughly 7.5 million people visit the mall every year and sales were about $527/sq foot. When built it was the first strip mall in Ottawa, although it has since become an enclosed mall.
It is located immediately south of the Rideau River on the corner of Bank Street and Riverside Drive, beside a large athletics complex, the RA Centre. The anchor stores are Walmart and Your Independent Grocer.
It opened in 1954 as "the first one-stop shopping destination to serve all of the City of Ottawa" according to its owners. At 65,750 sq ft (6,108 m2) it was Ottawa's first strip plaza.
When it was built it had only six stores, of which only Reitmans remains to this day. CIBC and Fairweather were also very early tenants which remain. In 1962 the mall underwent a major expansion to 23 stores which made it one of the largest shopping centres in Ottawa at the time. A 1961 Ottawa Citizen article covering the mall expansion claimed "the new centre by its accessibility to through highways, will become not only one of the largest shopping plazas in the district but one of the finest in the country."
Ottawa department store Ogilvy's opened a location at Billings Bridge in the 1962 expansion. Ogilvy's was replaced by Robinson's, which was replaced by discount retailer Zellers in 1996, by Target Canada in 2013 and Walmart Canada in May 2016.
It did not become an enclosed mall until 1972 and a twelve-storey office tower was added during an expansion in 1975.
In the late 1990s, a "remerchandizing program" brought in a number of new stores to replace old ones and "provide the proper tenant mix to suit this particular trade area and the shopping centre's customer base." In 1998–99 extensive renovations were carried out at a cost of $7 million; they added a new glass two-storey atrium as a main entrance, a modern food court, and an "updated look". In July 2006 another major renovation programme was started which expanded the mall by 25,000 sq ft (2,300 m2).
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