Antigonish Market Square (formerly Antigonish Mall) is an enclosed shopping mall in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Antigonish is a small town which is known for St. Francis Xavier University. Its current anchors are Canadian Tire, Mark's, Sport Chek, and Rossy.
History[]
By the 1970s, Antigonish was a growing university town which had more residents moving in. By the 1980s, Antigonish Mall was constructed on the outskirts of the town, by a highway interchange. Its main anchor was Canadian Tire. The mall had a mix of national and local tenants, such as Northern Reflections and Lawtons Drugs.
Throughout the next two decades or so, not too much changed at Antigonish Mall, similar to the town the mall was in. By the 2000s, the mall began to decline as a Walmart Supercentre had opened at the other side of Antigonish. In late 2006, construction started on a Boston Pizza, Sobeys, and several other tenants next to the parking lot of the mall. The new development opened in February 2007.
In 2015, Antigonish Mall changed their name to Antigonish Market Square. According to mall management, this was done to position itself as not only a place to shop, but more of a "lifestyle centre". In the same year, a section of vacant stores were turned into a Rossy variety store. The mall temporarily had a small resurgence in popularity throughout the years of 2015 and 2016. But by the late 2010s, the mall once again began to lose more tenants such as The Source, Bentley, and Robin's.
In late 2019, the Canadian Tire wing of the mall was closed off, and the space was converted into Sport Chek, Mark's, and an expanded Rossy store. This made the interior of the mall much smaller, and especially after the COVID pandemic in 2020, even more tenants closed.
Today, the majority of tenants in the Antigonish Market Square are currently vacant. With most of the mall now being gone, the mall has gotten even less popular. In the future, it would make sense for the rest of the Antigonish Market Square to be converted into a strip mall.