Eaton's Annex was a 10-storey building containing both retail and office space in Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It opened in January 1913 and was located at the northwest corner of Albert Street and James Street, [1] west of Eaton's Main Store and north of Toronto's (now former) City Hall.
By 1900, the Eaton's department store owned most of the land within the city blocks bordered by Yonge Street, Queen Street, Bay Street and Dundas Street. The land was eventually occupied by the Eaton's Main Store, the Annex building and various Eaton's warehouses and mail-order buildings. The Main Store and the Annex, however, were the only two buildings open to the public. The two buildings were connected by an underground passageway open to both employees and shoppers. It was the first underground pathway in Toronto open to the public, and it is often credited as a historic precursor to Toronto's current downtown PATH network.
When the Annex building opened in 1913 as Eaton's House Furnishing Building, it contained Eaton's housewares and furniture departments. [1] When these departments were moved to the new College Street store in 1930, the focus of the Annex's retail offerings was shifted to lower-cost items. While the Main Store catered to middle-class budgets, and the College Street store's offerings were more upscale, the Annex store was directed to Toronto's working classes. It offered many of the same departments and types of goods as Eaton's other two Toronto stores, but in cheaper varieties, and with less extensive in-store displays and customer service. As such, the Annex represented one of the first instances in Canada where a traditional, full-line department store operated a separate discount outlet or chain.
The Eaton's Annex and some surrounding warehouses were destroyed by fire on May 9, 1977. The fire was described as "the first of its kind in downtown Toronto since the Great Fire of 1904". Although it destroyed a number of Eaton's buildings and damaged the nearby Church of the Holy Trinity, it did not significantly affect the newly constructed first phase of the Toronto Eaton Centre. [2] [3]
Parts of the Annex building survive as Trinity Square. A portion of the Bell Trinity Square office complex currently occupies the former Annex site. The same underground passage that formerly linked the Annex and the Main Store now connects the Eaton Centre to the Bell Trinity Centre, and it is part of the PATH network.
In honour of this store, a ski run at the Caledon Ski Club in Caledon, Ontario, was named "Eaton's Annex" after the Eaton family, who were original members of the private club. [4]
Timothy Eaton was an Irish businessman who founded the Eaton's department store, one of the most important retail businesses in Canada's history.
Hudson's Bay, also known as The Bay, is a Canadian luxury goods department store chain. It is the flagship brand of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), the oldest, largest and longest-surviving company in North America as well as one of the oldest and largest continuously operating companies in the world.
The Toronto Eaton Centre is a shopping mall and office complex in the downtown core of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is owned and managed by Cadillac Fairview (CF). It was named after the Eaton's department store chain that once anchored it before the chain went defunct in the late 1990s.
The T. Eaton Company Limited, later known as Eaton's and then Eaton, was a Canadian department store chain that was once the largest in the country. It was founded in 1869 in Toronto by Timothy Eaton, an immigrant from what is now Northern Ireland. Eaton's grew to become a retail and social institution in Canada, with stores across the country, buying-offices around the globe, and a mail-order catalog that was found in the homes of most Canadians. A changing economic and retail environment in the late twentieth century, along with mismanagement, culminated in the chain's bankruptcy in 1999.
Queen Street is a major east–west thoroughfare in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It extends from Roncesvalles Avenue and King Street in the west to Victoria Park Avenue in the east. Queen Street was the cartographic baseline for the original east–west avenues of Toronto's and York County's grid pattern of major roads. The western section of Queen is a centre for Canadian broadcasting, music, fashion, performance, and the visual arts. Over the past twenty-five years, Queen West has become an international arts centre and a tourist attraction in Toronto.
The Arcadian Court is an Art Deco event space in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is located on the eighth floor of the flagship downtown Toronto location of the Canadian department store The Bay at Yonge and Queen Streets. For many years, it was an exclusive restaurant, then an art gallery, then closed and used for storage. It was restored and is now used as an event space.
Path is a network of underground pedestrian tunnels, elevated walkways, and at-grade walkways connecting the office towers of Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It connects more than 70 buildings via 30 kilometres (19 mi) of tunnels, walkways, and shopping areas. According to Guinness World Records, Path is the largest underground shopping complex in the world, with 371,600 square metres (4,000,000 sq ft) of retail space which includes over 1,200 retail fronts (2016). As of 2016, over 200,000 residents and workers use the Path system daily with the number of private dwellings within walking distance at 30,115.
The Church of the Holy Trinity is an Anglican church located at Trinity Square in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Charles Ogilvy Limited, or Ogilvy's, was a department store in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, founded in 1887. For much of the 20th century, Ogilvy's was one of Ottawa's higher-end department stores.
College Park is a shopping mall, residential and office complex on the southwest corner of Yonge and College streets in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Eaton Centre is a name associated with shopping centres in Canada, originating with Eaton's, one of Canada's largest department store chains at the time that these malls were developed. Eaton's partnered with development companies throughout the 1970s and 1980s to develop downtown shopping malls in cities across Canada. Each mall contained an Eaton's store, or was in close proximity to an Eaton's store, and typically the mall itself carried the "Eaton Centre" name. These joint ventures were a significant retail development trend in Canada during that period.
The Merchandise Building is a loft conversion of a former warehouse located in downtown Toronto on Dalhousie Street, near the campus of Toronto Metropolitan University and the Toronto Eaton Centre. Built in various stages from 1910 to 1949 for the Simpson's department store, and later owned by Sears Canada after Simpson's demise, the Merchandise Building at over 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) is one of the largest buildings by floor area in downtown Toronto. It is an example of the early 20th-century industrial Chicago School architectural style.
The Montreal Eaton Centre is a shopping mall located in the downtown core of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is accessible through the Underground City, which is connected to the Montreal Metro's McGill station.
There are two castings of the well-known statue of Timothy Eaton, the famous Canadian retailer: one in Toronto, Ontario, the other in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Downtown Toronto is the main central business district of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Located entirely within the district of Old Toronto, it is approximately 16.6 square kilometres in area, bounded by Bloor Street to the northeast and Dupont Street to the northwest, Lake Ontario to the south, the Don Valley to the east, and Bathurst Street to the west. It is also the home of the municipal government of Toronto and the Government of Ontario.
Cityplace is a nine-storey office and retail complex situated in Downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The number of weekly shoppers is 150,000.
Trinity Square is a public square in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is bounded on the east by the Toronto Eaton Centre, on the south and west by the Bell Trinity Square office complex, and on the north by the Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre hotel.
Hudson's Bay Queen Street is a building complex on the southwest corner of Yonge Street and Queen Street West in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was originally named the Simpson's Department Store, and operated as the flagship store of the Simpsons department store chain from 1895–1991. It became a flagship store of its successor, The Bay, in 1991. The building was retrofitted to house the first Saks Fifth Avenue department store in Canada in 2016.
The Lillian Massey Building is a Neoclassical building located in Downtown Toronto, at the southeast corner of Queen's Park and Bloor Street along the Mink Mile and across from the Royal Ontario Museum. It was designed by architect George Martell Miller (1855–1933) and built between 1908 and 1912 for the University of Toronto's Household Science program created by Lillian Massey Treble, daughter of wealthy Canadian business man, Hart Massey. It presently houses the offices of the University of Toronto's Department of Classics and Centre for Medieval Studies and the offices of the University of Toronto's Division of University Advancement. Part of the building previously housed Club Monaco’s flagship retail store until 2021.
Media related to Eaton's Annex at Wikimedia Commons