[ssiguy]

London's old central library is a beautiful building in a beautiful location. Today? It's in a mall.

That sounds very boring but in hind sight it was a great idea. The city desperately needed a larger main library but this was in the 90s when Eaton's closed. It left the largest downtown mall with gobs of empty space and a major commercial development that was going to turn into an empty shell and a blight on the urban landscape. This offered the ability to make sure that huge mall didn't collapse and gave Londoners a new much larger library in a very central location with underground parking and with 2 blocks of every downtown bus. Being on the main drag, Dundas Street, which was in collapse in the 90s, it also helped turn around the street and with it's new flex-street design, the main drag is quickly returning to it's former glory.

This precipitated other corporate and especially educational players to open downtown campuses like Fanshawe and, to a lesser extent, Western. It turned the tide for the mall which although not a thriving one, certainly a viable one so much so that the developer actually put more money into renovating the mall a couple years ago.

Thankfully the old building still remains and is fully occuppied so no heritage buildings were destroyed so it worked out to be a win-win. The movement of the library to the old Eaton's Centre was a first in Canada to try to salvage those huge gaping holes that had begun to develop across mid-size city Canada and has been followed by many cities in the country since.