Raise the Hammer

The NoFrills building is less than one-third of the land, given the parking lot.

Not saying I necessarily want it -- but the space of the land is huge enough for a REALLY HUGE flagship Fortino's if you follow the double-decker system and/or underground parking.

In the 90s they Loblaws did the "demo-rebuild" in my old Sandy Hill neighborhood in Ottawa on Rideau Street, and the results was actually fairly impressive for its era, considering this is 20 years old now.

I used to live near this urban Loblaws in Ottawa. Can you find the half-underground parking garage? It's VERY well hidden. The Loblaws became massive yet didn't tower (raised half a floor higher) and the parking was underneath the supermarket (half a floor underground), and the landscaping balanced the community concerns. That way, the new Loblaws didn't tower, since the main floor was only raised a few foot above to accomodate sunken single-level parking underneath.

This Loblaws I used to live near, occupies less land than the Gage NoFrills, yet its shopping floor is similar in size all the Fortinos we see elsewhere in Hamilton. The old small one shut down, construction occured, and a much bigger Loblaws arrived in the same land.

The size of the Gage NoFrills space is not a problem for a super-sized grocery store if you do a demo-rebuild with sunken or underground parking. In fact, the square footage of the nearby Walmart Supercentre building is actually roughly identical to the square footage of land that the Gage Park NoFrills is on -- when you include the large surface parking lot. You'd have a slightly odd-shaped building to have a Gage grocery superstore matching the Walmart square footage, but I've also visited large odd-shaped Loblaws elsewhere in Ontario too. Even if you remained rectangular, you'd still have about 2.5x single-level square footage as the building today.

Just because the NoFrills underperforms, doesn't mean a demo-rebuild of a flagship will not underperform. The size of the shop was its chief disadvantage.

That said, given the income levels of Ward 3, I'm not 100% sure if Fortino's is the right brand. (Myself, I'd definitely shop at a Fortino's in this location, though). Just saying, there's more than plenty of room for a huge supermarket that blows away anything at Centre, if one is perhaps inevitably coming.

Comment edited by mdrejhon on 2016-03-16 11:58:17