Yorkdale’s owners got their way, and a Fairweather-owned department store will not be moving in
Oxford Properties called Fairweather’s brand “temporary and downmarket” and argued that it wouldn’t be a suitable Yorkdale tenant
A judge has made her decision, and a department store owned by the Fairweather brand won’t be moving into Yorkdale Shopping Centre.
Given the massive empty retail space left vacant by the Bay’s closure last year, Fairweather had wanted to move its Les Ailes de la Mode department store into the mall.
Related: Yorkdale is doing everything it can to keep a Fairweather store from opening
But, in Ontario Superior Court last month, a lawyer representing Oxford Properties argued that Yorkdale is a “leading luxury retail destination” and that Fairweather doesn’t belong there. In court filings, Oxford said Fairweather’s stores “look and feel temporary and downmarket.” Fairweather’s representatives countered that the women’s clothing store had been one of Yorkdale’s earliest tenants, back in 1964. The brand remained in Yorkdale until its lease expired in 2020.
Judge Jessica Kimmel asked Oxford Properties whether it might rethink its exclusion of Fairweather in order to resume collecting rent payments after the Bay filed for creditor protection and moved out.
“Having an anchor tenant space vacant with no rent being paid is far better for the shopping centre and its tenants than an unsuitable anchor tenant,” Oxford’s lawyer replied last month.
Today, Kimmel concluded that “there is an apparent lack of commercial soundness to this arrangement” and blocked Fairweather from taking the space, according to the Canadian Press.
A November affidavit reviewed by the Canadian Press shows just how much Oxford Properties did not want Fairweather in the mall.
“I cannot overemphasize how inappropriate and detrimental it would be to have Fairweather occupy the most prominent premises at Yorkdale for even one year, much less the next 50 years as contemplated by the proposed Fairweather transaction,” a vice-president with Oxford, Nadia Corrado, said in the document. “This would have the effect of compromising decades of significant investment and planning by Oxford and create a cascading negative effect for Yorkdale’s existing tenants.”
The former Bay location, once the mall’s prime real estate, will remain empty for now.
Related: The Battle for the Bay—how the country’s oldest corporation came to its bitter end
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
