Jackson Square (Hamilton, Ontario)
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| Location | 2 King Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, L8P 1A1, Canada |
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| Opening date | 1970 (First Phase) |
| Developer | Yale Properties Limited |
| Management | First Real Properties Limited (Joint-venture company owned by Yale Properties Limited and The Standard Life Assurance Company of Canada) |
| Owner | First Real Properties Limited |
| No. of stores and services | Approximately 230 |
| Total retail floor area | Approximately 390,000 Square Feet |
| No. of floors | 2 |
| Website | Official website |
Lloyd D. Jackson Square, also known as Jackson Square, is an indoor shopping mall, and commercial complex located in the downtown core of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, which is named after Lloyd Douglas Jackson, who served as mayor of the city from 1950 to 1962. The civic square is located in the centre of the city, bounded by several major roads: King Street (south), Bay Street (west), York Boulevard (north) and James Street (east), with the appointed address being 2 King Street West. The mall officially opened in 1970.
Toward the end of the Second World War, a new consciousness arose amongst the public and policy makers of the Western World. After ten years of crippling economic depression and another five at war, the public demanded something new from their disintegrating urban environments. Hamilton, Ontario was no exception. After witnessing its once inferior rival Toronto grow in size and importance in the early twentieth century, the city petitioned for funds to complete a modernist makeover of its downtown core under the newly amended National Housing Act (1954).
The revised legislation provided for cost sharing amongst the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and the federal and municipal government, in preparation for urban renewal studies. It also included provisions for implementing the results of these studies, including clearing property and upgrading public services. With a majority of Hamilton's employment based in the industrial sector, the city's modernist planners wished to divide the municipality into practical zones that would serve specific functions, and to connect the zones with efficient transportation corridors that could move goods quickly and without disruption. Local politicians and business owners favoured such plans and began to view their mostly Victorian urban landscape as disjointed, crowded, and unfit for the navigation of the vehicles that were beginning to crowd the streets. Starting in 1957, the Hamilton Downtown Association began to pressure the federal government to fund an urban renewal study. When the study was completed a year later in 1958, federal planner Mark David was unable to recommend redevelopment in the downtown core because the federal cost-sharing program that was a part of the National Housing Act only allotted funds for the improvement of housing conditions amongst Canada's urban slums. Despite this setback, funds were granted following the completion of the study for the relocation of cottages on the Lake Ontario beach and the clearance of derelict housing in the city's residential North End neighbourhood. Hamilton businessmen, still set on renewing the commercial core, continued to lobby for amendments that would allow downtown redevelopment.
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