The Cloverdale Mall

When I was a kid there used to be a big park and ball field pretty much in downtown Cloverdale for sports events like baseball games. The fire department was across the street and on Halloween the department put on fireworks shows. All this ended in the early 1970’s when the Cloverdale Mall was built on the field.

In accompaniment with building the Cloverdale Mall, the Cloverdale Bypass was built, allowing through 176th Street traffic a short detour to avoid driving through downtown Cloverdale. So the mall sits approximately between 58th and 57th Avenues and 176th Street and the Bypass.

If memory serves me correctly the Cloverdale Mall opened in 1973 or perhaps early 1974. This was a big thing for Cloverdale having several shops in one covered area. Safeway was the token grocery store and other establishments inside the mall included Shopper’s Drug Mart, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the government liquor store, the Mixer Shack, the Four Seasons (Chinese Restaurant), a bakery, a record store, Saan, a fast food fried chicken place who’s name escapes me (not KFC), and a coffee shop where you ordered at the window and took your drinks and snacks to one of the benches or tables throughout the mall. I’m sure there were other stores in there, but these were the main stores when the mall first opened. I was going to Cloverdale Junior High at the time and I was in the band and several times we performed inside the mall. There would be other musical groups occasionally performing there during the first few years the mall was open.

Almost immediately after opening the Cloverdale Mall was plagued with problems, notably a leaky roof. Every rainy day I came to the mall there would be buckets placed around catching the water. Safeway was a disgusting place to shop. It was a small store and staff were kept busy mopping up the water and placing out buckets to catch the rain water that constantly dripped inside. The store always appeared dirty no matter how diligently the staff tried to keep on top of the leaky roof.

The mall just wasn’t that popular and by 1980 was pretty much a ghost town with Cloverdale shoppers heading to the recently revamped Guildford Mall or the newly opened Willowbrook Mall. The school bands and other independent acts no longer performed inside the mall.

The liquor store kept the customers coming into the mall. But after a few years the liquor store relocated to its current location on 176th Street near the Number 10 Highway and that was the beginning of Cloverdale Mall’s slow death. Shopper’s Drug Mart and the Scotiabank relocated to other areas of Cloverdale, the Safeway closed down, and one by one the remaining stores shut down and the mall’s owners were unable to find new retailers to lease to. By the late 1990’s the mall had a handful of retailers and several churches leasing space. But now the retailers have all gone and the churches and religious groups are still leasing former retail space.

The City of Surrey owns the land and has been trying to sell it. Developers with a vision of mixed residential and commercial have been invited to put in a bid. It was announced earlier this year that the property had been sold, but last week the City of Surrey amended that to say the buyer had backed out due to financing and the mall is officially up for sale again.

No matter who buys this property and what is eventually built on there, I doubt the vision is going to match the reality. In hindsight perhaps the property would have been better left in its original form as a park where kids came out to play baseball and on Halloween we all enjoyed the fireworks.