Elgin Mall

Elgin Mall opened in October 1975 in St. Thomas, Ontario, anchored by Dominion and Kmart, and has operated continuously since, though the property now trades as Elgin Centre after a 2023 rename that coincided with the last piece of a decade-long vacancy finally getting filled. The mall remains the only enclosed shopping center in St. Thomas.

That vacancy traces back to March 2013, when Zellers, the Kmart space’s second incarnation after Hudson’s Bay converted Kmart locations in 1998, closed permanently following Target’s acquisition of the Zellers chain. Target itself never took the St. Thomas location, leaving the anchor space empty for five years until Dollarama and Giant Tiger split it in 2018, with JYSK filling the remaining piece on July 29, 2023, around the same time the mall adopted its current name.

Metro anchors the grocery side, tracing its own lineage through a 2005 conversion from A&P, itself a 1990s rebrand of the original Dominion anchor. Pharmasave, Dollarama and Giant Tiger round out the anchor tier, with roughly 44 tenants operating across the property, including Galaxy Cinemas, a multiplex that Cineplex Entertainment opened in 2003 and that remains St. Thomas’s only movie theater.

That half-century of continuous operation, through three different anchor-space configurations and a name change, makes Elgin Centre a rarer case among small-city enclosed malls: most 1970s-built centers this size either closed outright or converted to open-air strip formats once their department-store anchors failed. Elgin Centre instead backfilled in stages and kept its enclosed layout intact.