is
Ontario's largest
Shopping Mall in number of shops and the third-largest in square footage in
Canada , after
West Edmonton Mall in
Edmonton, Alberta , and
Metrotown in
Burnaby ,
British Columbia .
Its address is 100 City Centre Drive in downtown
Mississauga , Ontario, Canada. Square One is located at
Highway 403 and
Hurontario Street formerly
Highway 10 (which it's still commonly referred as), about 21 km from
Downtown Toronto and 9 km from
Toronto 's
Pearson International Airport . The mall is in close proximity to the
Mississauga Civic Centre (City Hall), the
Living Arts Centre , and
Playdium . Located within the mall grounds is the main terminal of the
Mississauga Transit bus network, which was opened in
1997 .
Square One Shopping Centre is currently owned and managed by
Oxford Properties Group and contains over 360 stores and services, 8,700 parking spaces and 1.6 million square feet (150,000 m²) of retail space. The mall serves an average of over 21 million customers each year.
Excavation of the Square One site began in
1969 . The mayor of the nearby Village of
Streetsville (now part of Mississauga),
Hazel McCallion , attended the ground-breaking ceremony, which was held in the middle of a hayfield. The mall outdates the City of Mississauga itself, the city having been built around the mall.
In ,
Sears ,
The Bay and
Woolco (a subsidiary of
Woolworth's ). In
1978 , the mall won the Energy Conservation Recognition Award for its computerized temperature control system, the first ever in a Canadian mall.
During the
1980s , Square One underwent numerous expansions, adding 80 more stores and over a million square feet to the property. In the mid
1990s , Woolco closed. The Woolco location was transformed into the world's largest
Wal-Mart store (220,000 sq ft).
of Square One Shopping Centre.]]
Between
2000 and
2003 , a new expansion termed Cityside was completed. This latest expansion added 320,000 square feet to the mall, with an additional 370,000 sq ft for parking. New stores opened include
Old Navy ,
Home Outfitters , and
Tommy Hilfiger . A new
Cineplex Odeon movie theatre was also opened. In 2005, the theatre was bought by the
Empire Theatres chain.
Square One was the site of a fatal stabbing in the summer of 2004 and a fatal gunshot wound in the summer of 2005. However, shoppers still flock to the mall as these isolated incidents were anomalies rather than common occurrences.
During the massive
2003 North American Blackout , which cut power to parts of the
Northeastern United States and Canada, Square One had to be evacuated. The evacuation was safely completed within less than one hour, and the mall remained closed for a day and a half until power was restored to the city.
