South Shore Mall (Not to be confused with South Shore Centre, also a mall in Bridgewater.) was an enclosed shopping centre in Bridgewater, NS Canada.
History[]
Bridgewater was suburbanizing throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Since there were no malls and little suburban retail at the time, this mall was built at the outskirts of the town. The mall started construction in 1972, with an opening date of 1974.
The mall opened with 2 anchors, a 23 000 square foot SaveEasy grocery store, and a 40 000 square foot Metropolitan (Later branded as Met-Mart) which was a Canadian discount department store chain, similar to something like Kmart. The mall also opened with a 2 screen Empire Theatres.
The mall did good, but the same year the mall open, Bridgewater Mall (Now South Shore Centre) started construction, and it was open by 1976. Bridgewater Mall was much bigger, was right by downtown, and it had stores such as Zellers and Sobeys, which were more recognizable than local chains like Metropolitan and SaveEasy.
By the 1980s, the mall was declining, less people were going to it, and they had several vacancies. In the early 1990s, an arcade and laser tag arena opened in the mall to try and bring more business, but this closed soon after. Also in the early 1990s, the Dooly's billiard hall closed its location at the mall, which lost even more business to the mall and even worse, the Lawtons Drugs at the mall also closed and moved near Bridgewater Mall.
In late 1996, the mall officially closed the interior of the mall. The SaveEasy moved to Bridgewater Plaza on the other side of town, and the Empire Theatres moved next to Bridgewater Mall.
In 1997, Metropolitan officially filed for bankruptcy and was acquired by SAAN, although the South Shore Mall location wasn't rebranded. With all stores gone from the mall, it sat abandoned and rotted away for many years. In 2009, A Lawtons Drugs was built right where the main driveway into the mall parking lot was, blocking the abandoned mall from road view. In the same year, the mall was demolished. It sat as rubble for many years, until 2024, when a housing development started construction on the property.
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