Sex shop departure latest blow for near-empty plaza
The Toronto owner of a large but almost completely deserted Windsor shopping plaza asks the news reporter for business advice: “What can you do to help me?”
Carlo di Bernardo concedes his Dougall Plaza in the 2500 block of Dougall Avenue is “not doing good at all.” But he laughs over the phone when asked how he can afford to keep paying the utilities, maintenance and property taxes on an 18-acre commercial property that boasts a massive, empty parking lot and only one remaining active business in a 140,000-square-foot development.
“I’m not worried — I’ve got properties in Toronto,” he said. “In Toronto, everybody is making money.”
Di Bernardo said he was recently offered $10 million cash for a commercial
property in Etobicoke that he scooped up for $600,000 during the 1989 recession. He’s holding onto that one, and he’s holding onto Dougall Plaza, for which he has high hopes that a bit of that Toronto property frenzy might someday reach Windsor.
“Put a story in your paper — ‘Empty plaza with lots of possibilities,’ ” he urged.
Immediately to the north lies the 14-acre Dorwin Plaza, also nearly empty and in perhaps worse shape, with patches of mould, crumbling facades, a leaky roof and a large and broken asphalt parking lot in dire need of resurfacing.
Dougall Plaza has one active business, Absolute Fitness for Women. Dorwin Plaza’s main concourse in the 2400 block of Dougall Avenue also has a sole occupant, a Service Ontario outlet, among 20 other empty commercial units.
“They’re eyesores — it’s just sad,” Tammy Williams, a broker with Re/Max Capital Inc. who specializes in commercial property, said of the blighted twin plazas.
As with Windsor’s hot residential real estate market, commercial properties are at a premium — “We’re running out of product,” Williams said — yet here lies an empty swath of more than 32 acres of almost completely unused shopping plaza space.
“And look directly across the street — it’s all full,” Williams said.
On a recent midday visit, parking lots were full along a stretch of businesses that make up the 2400 and 2500 blocks on the east side of Dougall Avenue.
After 14 years at Dougall Plaza, Aren’t We Naughty packed up its lingerie and sex toys this month and joined a large number of former Dougall and Dorwin neighbours who have resettled along Walker Road, south of Division Road.
According to its spokeswoman, there might have been a time when Aren’t We Naughty, the adult sex shop chain, was unwelcome in the fast-growing commercial district along Windsor’s big box outlets.
But, “it’s 2017 — people are more accepting of our business,” regional manager Kim Broderick said.
Walker Road, she said, has become “a happening place.”
“It was a little sad leaving, but it had to be done,” Broderick said.
Aren’t We Naughty, now located at 4185 Walker Rd., is a destination store, she said, and it did a “booming” trade until about 2012.
“But I’d say our business dropped by 40 per cent due to nobody else being there.”
Kim Vance didn’t have a problem finding a spot to park last Thursday in the Dougall Plaza’s empty acres of asphalt as she attended Absolute Fitness. Her daughter also has a membership, but Vance said she’d never let her teenager come on her own after dark.
“Just look at it — there’s nobody here, it looks run down,” the Windsor woman said of the ghostly plaza.
Keith Oram also had no problem finding parking on Thursday but discovered that his regular lunchtime destination at the Dougall Plaza had disappeared. A sign on the locked doors announced the Queen Buffet was closed but would reopen with a new name — the Exciting International Buffet — and under new owners and management in September.
“I guess we gotta go find another place to eat,” Oram told his lunch guest, a first-time visitor to that location who shook his head at all the nothingness. Oram remembers the plaza, where he bought a parrot 30 years ago, as a once-thriving commercial zone.
“This area, it’s kinda like a death of business if you locate here,” Oram said.
Di Bernardo expressed surprise when told of the Queen Buffet’s status.
“You know more than I do,” he told the Star.
Struggling for years, Dougall Plaza took a big blow when the large Food Basics outlet vacated as an anchor tenant in 2014.
“I’d say the last five years, the plaza has gone down and down and down,” said Broderick, whose business was paying its lease on a month-to-month basis in order to be ready to get out quick when the perfect new property became available elsewhere.
While di Bernardo, who purchased Dougall Plaza several years ago for $3.9 million, sits and waits for better times, the owner of the Dorwin Plaza next door has given up after only a few years once big plans fell through.
Quach Infinite Inc., owned by Toronto investor Kevin Quach, is asking $3.5 million for the plaza — opened in 1956 — which he purchased in 2013 (the selling price listing at that time, discounted from an original $6.4 million, was $4.5 million).
Quach got the “World Market Fresh” sign up and some of the interior design completed on his proposed 26,000-square-foot Asian grocery store, but it never opened. Aside from the hyper-busy but relatively small Service Ontario contracted space, there’s almost no other commercial activity in the 14-acre Dorwin Plaza with its 76,000 square feet of retail space.
Springz Trampoline and Amusement Park, located in the former Value Village property at 2411 Dougall Ave., is not part of the Dorwin Plaza and is separately owned.
“I just come and go where I’ve got to go, and then I get out,” said Joanne Lalonde, interviewed as she was departing Dougall Plaza’s Absolute Fitness.
The vast parking lot space shared by the two near-empty shopping plazas was recently divided down the middle by a line of concrete blocks after di Bernardo got tired of truck driving schools using the ocean of unused asphalt to train budding truckers in their tractortrailers.
“It’s very depressing when you come here,” said Lalonde, adding she also avoids the gym after dark.
City Coun. Paul Borrelli, whose Ward 10 hosts the two plazas, said what’s needed are new anchor tenants or “someone with imagination” to turn the two properties around.
“If he’s got the money, I guess he can sit on it,” Borrelli said of the Dougall Plaza’s Toronto landlord.
Dougall Plaza, with fewer but much larger units, was once home to a Shoppers Drug Mart, a bingo hall and a large furniture store. Dorwin Plaza has been home to dozens of businesses, many of which have moved on to different South Windsor locations, including Moores Clothing and M&M Food Market.
“For some reason, tenants just can’t seem to stay there,” Borrelli said.