When I heard the news last week that the venerable Hudson’s Bay company — established in 1670, and Canada’s oldest retailer — was seeking bankruptcy protection and looking to close up to 50 per cent of its stores, my first thought was sic transit gloria mundi (“thus passes the glory of the world”). The Bay has been an integral part of this country for more than 350 years, but that counts for nothing in a world of changing shopping patterns and shifting consumer allegiances.
My second thought was to wonder if the Bay store in Richmond would be one of the victims of the corporate axe. Opened in 1969 near the intersection of No. 3 Road and Westminster Highway, it looms large in my memory, a hulking block of a building that stood by itself for its first few years. Across a parking lot which was, to my young self, as vast as the sea stood Richmond Square Shopping Mall, and nearby were such Richmond landmarks as the Kings Burgers Drive-In (not to be confused with Burger King), Wosk’s Furniture, and the Skookum Slide, with a Dairy Queen sitting in its shadow.
What was the Skookum Slide, you ask? It was a large slide — 30 feet high at its top, 190 feet long — with three “hills” along its length. For 10 cents a ride (three rides for a quarter), you would climb to the top, where you would be issued with a burlap sack, upon which you would launch yourself down the slide. The Skookum Slide had a green-and-white striped awning over its entirety: a nod to the notoriously damp Richmond climate.
When I was eight years old, the DQ beside the slide was a favourite place for our softball team to go, and while I often gazed longingly at the Skookum Slide, I never actually rode it. My mother, bless her, had heard about a child somewhere who had gone down one of those slides and broken their leg, so the delights of the Skookum Slide went un-sampled by my brother and me. (It’s okay; unbeknownst to Mom, my dad let us go on the similar slide at the PNE when we visited each August. Mom, if you’re just learning this now, I’m sorry.)
The Bay store, however, was a delight very much sampled by me in my early years. The main floor was given over to clothes and shoes and perfumes and other things with limited appeal to a child, but it did possess escalators in the centre of the building. The floor tiles were a drab brown, but the escalators were surrounded by a circle of gaily-painted yellow tiles, which always made me think of The Wizard of Oz as I skipped along them, eager to ascend to the second floor.
That was where the book section was, and I would zero in on it, eager to add a Nancy Drew book to my ever-expanding collection. They were hardbacks, priced at $1.79 each, and I was usually allowed to pick one, a process that took several minutes as I considered each title and assessed its appeal. The decision made, Mom would often take us to the Bay's Haida Room, a “serve yourself” restaurant with sandwiches and salads and desserts enticingly displayed in refrigerated cabinets, and soups served with a pack of Saltine crackers, and entrees such as Salisbury steak or open-faced hot beef sandwiches. Oh, the wonder of it!
We moved from Richmond in 1973, and by the time we returned in 1977 the Skookum Slide was gone and a second mall — Richmond Centre — snaked out from the Bay store towards Richmond Square like a wayward tentacle. Lansdowne Mall had opened further along No. 3 Road, all bright and shiny, and I gravitated towards it instead, lured by its food court and the much larger book section at Woodward’s.
Sic transit gloria mundi indeed. Woodward’s is gone, and the Bay might soon follow; gone, but not forgotten. Thanks for the many memories.
