| rev:text
| - What a glorious, blasphemous mess.
The first thing you notice when you roll up to Bramalea Centre is how piecemeal and scattershot the whole place is. Rest assured, this was not a facility built with expansion in mind. Walking from a meeting at the nearby Region of Peel building, I noticed a number of stores grafted onto the side, including a Hudson's Bay, Forever 21 and a Saks Fifth Avenue all awkwardly jutting out from the frame of this Frankenstein-like entity.
Maybe I'm just spoiled because I'm a 20-minute trip away from several malls in Mississauga that were built with form and functionality in mind (I'm looking at Square One), but the first impression wasn't exactly a great one.
I'm aware that this site has been compared to Yorkdale Mall, and the similarities aren't far off the mark - a mall set in a highly-urban cener that's been completely dressed up to be a destination for the uber-rich with the aesthetic to match. This being Brampton, though, the mall can't escape its... hood trappings, for lack of a better description.
Despite the beautiful interiors, the place is filled with a lot of janky-looking people who are just loitering about. The food court is a small affair that seems to be oddly small for a site of this size, and it drew comparisons for me to Sheridan Mall in Clarkson (which has a similar setup with nowhere near the traffic). On my way to McDonalds' to grab a coffee, I saw how rough and messy the place was - if you are going to grab a bite here, there are a handful of restaurants scattered throughout the mall that look much brighter and clean.
I also found myself getting lost, even when using the mall's touch-screen map system. I was looking for an RBC branch to do some banking, and the directions it gave me either weren't clear (it doesn't seem to differentiate between the first or second floor) or not straightforward, because I ended up lost and had to walk all around the mall to find what I was looking for. Half the screens in the mall didn't appear to work correctly, either.
One thing I'll give the place kudos for are the incredibly-comfortable seats peppered throughout the hall. I actually sat down and surfed on the wi-fi for a bit, and was pleasantly surprised with how peaceful the experience was.
There are some good aspects here, and it's easy to see why it's a preferred destination for families and students in the afternoons - it's right next to a bus stop and is smackdab in the center of Brampton, so there's no real way to escape it.
With a few caveats (confusing layout/design, weird selection of stores, janky food court), this is a solid mall to visit if you ever need something. Worth a look.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)