Along for the Ride
FROM FEBRUARY 2024 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
Woodbine Mall is in receivership. As its retailers and its once great attraction, the Fantasy Fair, limp toward the finish line, Kunal Chaudhary visits for one last roundabout and remembers what the mall once meant to him
WEP associate editor Kunal Chaudhary rides the train at Woodbine Mall’s Fantasy Fair.
From its exterior, where a wooden rocking horse has been removed from the facade, leaving only the tanline of its imprint, the Woodbine Mall may seem like a Rexdale institution in the late stages of decline. Inside, few brand-name stores remain open – Sweet Jesus and Presotea have bars pulled over their storefronts in the middle of the afternoon. On the ground floor, independent clothing stores have spread their wares bazaar-like into the mall’s central promenade, advertising Boxing Day sales in the middle of January.
The shopping centre, along with the nearby Rexdale Mall, has declared bankruptcy and gone into receivership, its fate passed back and forth between the hands of a lending company and Woodbine’s bankrupt owner. An employee who has worked at the mall for two decades tells me it might not be here in a couple of years. The debt is said to be in the hundreds of millions, the owner a ghost in the wind.*
This is a “dead mall” – the terminal image conjuring decay, rigor mortis – and functions as a stop on at least one tour of such shopping centres, alongside Chinatown Centre and High Point Mall in Mississauga. But, unlike its grave-fellows, this mall contains a one-of-a-kind attraction that has served as a pilgrimage site for generations of Rexdale’s children, and those from even farther afield.
Woodbine Mall’s Fantasy Fair is Ontario’s largest indoor amusement park, and has hosted more than 8 million guests since it first opened in 1985. Today, the Fair is largely unchanged from my experience of it as a child in the early-aughts. At its centre sits an original Looff Carousel, built by Danish master carver Charles I.D. Looff in 1911, and painstakingly restored at the Fantasy Fair in 1985, its original wooden horses replaced with fibreglass replicas. Today, it’s one of 13 surviving Looff carousels, and the only one in Canada.
The historic Louff carousel at Fantasy Fair, originally built in 1911 and reconstructed in the mall in 1985.
The Fair also includes a dozen other rides, including a Ferris wheel, a Tilt-A-Whirl and a train that leads one through an anachronistic jungle adventure replete with gorillas, tigers, dinosaurs and a mildly alarming stretch of tunnel. Twenty years ago, the lines to the Fair spilled out into the mall, and children clambered forcefully up its arcing jungle gym and muscled against one another to get onto the rides, into the bumper cars and arcade. Today, on a Wednesday afternoon, the Fair sleeps and lazily ferries its handful of guests to and from the rides.
I am among them, sitting on the train that winds through the greatest joy of my childhood, thinking about my mother.
Twenty years ago, as new immigrants, both my parents worked unconscionable hours under the table, my mother at a pharmaceutical company and my father as a security guard. The resulting poverty is a tired tale: discounts at Payless, bargain bin clothes, splitting toys at Dollarama, the scantness of our lives never communicated but always felt, understood as a cold fact of being here. In the wide alienation of that life, she would save, squirreling cash into an envelope that would appear on certain improbable Saturdays with only one promise: Fantasy Fair.
Our routine was always the same: The 10-ticket package allowed my brother and I five rides each and unlimited time in the jungle gym. Naturally, we spent most of our time there before spinning like laundry in the teacups, crashing into one another in bumper cars, getting thrown around on the Tilt-A-Whirl, and taking in the sights from the Ferris wheel or one of the other rides that threw us way up high, giving us the full panorama of a mall that seemed – still seems – the most exciting place in Rexdale that a child could be.
Afterwards, in the food court, we would debrief. My mother would give my brother and me a crisp note and allow us to practise that hallowed activity of spending money. We would order one meal from Burger King, splitting the burger between us while she had the fries, and recount to her in childlike detail the dramatic confrontations that ensued on the jungle gym, the thrill of being tossed around in great machines, the marvel of it all.