I live very close to Westbrook mall, about a 5 minute walk.
This mall is terrible, is an eyesore, has terrible stores, and drags down the surrounding community. The stores in this mall are of the "dollar store" variety, one of those malls you would not be totally shocked to see a vacume repair store. You will see no decent brand name stores within the mall, the only remotely high end retailers are Starbucks attached to the outside of the mall.
The interior of the mall is bland, lacking in natural light, lacking in interesting architechtural areas that a proper mall should have. Take for example the foodcourt of Chinook Center, the high ceiling with colorful airplanes moving about, the interesting displays/signs for the food outlets, the spacious muti teired open seating area with ample natural light. Take MarketMall, the huge amount of natural light coming from skylights in the very high ceiling, the live trees, the water feature at the entrance near the Starbucks. Or look to the renovations of TD Square, the push towards more natural light, the excellent new food court, a flat out better shopping area, and thus these places attract the higher end retailers.
The layout of the mall is a rectangle, single main corridor setup with branches going off that main corridor to exits and stores with even less appeal then to justify existence in the central corridor. It has no second level, no chance to use a second story to open up the ceailing of the main level ala Chinook center, and then it misses that which other single level malls like Marketmall and even Northland did, make a more organic non-geometric shape.
The exterior of the mall is poor as well, the back side of the mall on 37th street "looks" like the back of a mall, a mall that has busy access roads from all sides like Westbrook needs to be built more like SouthCenter or Marketmall, ALL sides of the building should be inviting and look like proper entrances and nothing should look so clearly like the garbage side and place where trucks unpack. Most malls mask these areas, and it helps both the mall and the community that does not have to see that eyesore.
Westbrook Mall has one thing only going for it, location. It is in the SW, close access to downtown, on a soon to be complete C-Train station. This is a affluent section of the city, housing prices are not low, new developments are popping up that will attract even more downtown execs to the neighborhood. It is a huge area once the school is torn down, if one was to demolish the mall, the school, the walmart, in effect everything in the square from Bow Trail to 17th avenue and from 37th street to 33rd street, one would have ample room to build a large, high end, attractive, indoor mall that would be located in prime real estate and get large amounts of traffic. This would be a profitable venture AND would greatly help to revitalize the community, which is atm held back by this low end mall.
There is a revitalization plan that can be found on the web by the City of Calgary, this plan should be acted upon, there are few areas in the city that need redevelopment more then Westbrook and few that could so positively benefit from it with the new high rise condo complexes being built, the golfcourse right there, and such important access routes into the very well populated and affluent SW Radio Hill area of the city.
This mall, the school, and everything to 17th avenue needs to be demolished and redveloped from the ground up. If it is done the whole community will see tremendous gains and the project will have the added bonus of being a huge finacial success. A proper large and attractive mall built in this area, using all of the land mentioned, would end up being the most busy mall in Calgary, the location blows Marketmall out of the water even before the C-Train is taken into account and the C-Train access is far better then Chinook has to offer along with less competition in the area then Chinook with another major mall on McLeod Trail only 10 minutes away.
This could easily be the best mall in the city, they simply need to build it, rest assured people will come. read more