Cloverdale Mall demolition Feb 21 2011

I took some photos of the demolition at the old Cloverdale Mall. Sorry for the quality - only had my iPhone with me. You can click on the photo for a larger view.

The old Safeway is completely gone and if anyone remembers where the BC Liquor Store used to be beside it, that's gone too, and the bakery that used to be next to it by the side entrance from the 57th Avenue side.

If you stand on 57th side you can see daylight right through to the other end of the mall. One of the photos where I was near the temporary fence, the old ramp for the Safeway trucks is still there, just an indentation in the parking lot now.

Cloverdale Co-op Grocery Store

When I was a kid one of my favorite things was to accompany my mother on her Friday afternoon grocery shopping at the Co-op in Cloverdale. It was on the south side of Highway 10, at approximately at 176th Street. It was a neat two story building. Groceries were on the first floor and upstairs was the hardware department that also sold clothing. The Co-op owned most of the land for a block east down Highway 10 and had various warehouse buildings, some occupied, some empty. The Co-op had a feed mill, a separate building on the east side of the grocery store, separated by a driveway and parking lot. When I turned thirteen and got my first horse that feed mill came in handy and my father would take me there to buy oats for Duchess. There was a lumber yard out back, on the south side of the buildings.

But back to the groceries. My mother made a shopping list and she used that to pull items off the shelf. She would rarely deviate from the list and buy other items. I always got a popsicle on the shopping trips. This was back in the days when the grocery stores sold them as singles instead of in the multi packages that are available today. I usually ate the popsicle while I accompanied her up and down the aisles and when we got to the cashier we put the empty wrapper on the belt and the cashier would add it up with the groceries. No big deal. All part of small town living.

I still remember our Co-op membership number – 3428.

My father remembers that the Co-op used to have a meat processing plant there and they made a good profit buying wholesale and selling retail. I don’t remember this section of the Co-op at all. Maybe my vegetarian mind has blocked it out….

The Co-op grocery store closed around 1975. I don’t recall why. For some reason I thought this was a union store and the employees went on strike and it never was resolved. However my father says the Co-op closed due to bad management, unable to make a profit.

A year or so after the grocery closed the building burnt down. A spectacular fire of this two story warehouse. I wasn’t in town at the time but one of my friends who lived nearby went to check out the fire and she said all of Cloverdale and half of Langley turned out to watch the building burn.

In late 1980 the Co-op grocery store tried again in Cloverdale, anchor store of a new mall that was built on Highway 10 on some of the same land where the Co-op warehouses originally stood. I was in there a few times and not many people were shopping there. After several years absence most of the residents of Cloverdale had found other grocery stores in Langley and weren’t switching back. The cashiers at the new Co-op were all a lazy, stuck up, silly bunch. I swear they were all under the influence of some controlled substance. This bunch sure couldn’t help the new Co-op grocery store gain and retain customers. I came in during a power outage to buy something. There were two or three cashiers working (and I use that word loosely) and each had one or two customers in their lane. But the cashiers were all standing around with their thumbs up their asses. Their cash registers were electric and they had no back up plan for power outages. This was back in the day before electronic scanners. All grocery products were stamped with a price and the cashier would enter the amount for each product. So I headed over to the Safeway at the Cloverdale Mall to make my purchase. The cashiers there were very busy and their registers were working. Even though these were also electronic cash registers they had a manual over ride for when the power was out. The Safeway cashiers were able to punch in the price and pull a lever after each price was entered, and then moved on to the next item.

The new Co-op grocery store closed down within a year of opening. With lousy cashiers, no customers, and possibly the same bad management that caused the original store to close, they never stood a chance.

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.