Welcome to Wayback Wednesday sponsored by Cavalcade Color Lab! Every week, we’ll be sharing a vintage photo and asking our readers to chime in with anything you can recall about the photo, other related memories, or even a funny caption. Have some vintage photos of your own? Send them to [email protected] and we may share them with our readers!
Scroll down to see last week’s photo.
This 1970s photo shows the future site of “Muskoka’s largest enclosed mall”. Do you know where this is and what’s there now?
Wayback Wednesday is sponsored by Cavalcade Color Lab
Last week we shared this photo with you:
Jacquie Howell ventured: “This week’s photo is the first chalet at Hidden Valley – sometime around 1960-61 – Ski lift ran in the fall for all to enjoy the colours.”
Lisa Grozelle Makela, via Facebook, also pegged the photo as the chalet, guessing the date as 1978.
And a Facebook conversation between Charlene Anne Neill and Hillary Claire has us intrigued:
Charlene: You know those windows well eh?
Hillary: Got the scar to prove it!
Charlene: You know those windows well eh?
Hillary: Got the scar to prove it!
The photo is, indeed, of the chalet at Hidden Valley Highlands Ski Area (then Hidden Valley Ski Club). We don’t know the exact date, but Jacquie is likely very close.
Photo courtesy of the archives at the Muskoka Ski Club / Hidden Valley Highlands Ski Area
I don’t think the town (or us) should have allowed the massacre of forest land above the tree line for Home Depot, Honda, Beer Store and Tim Horton’s. It has changed the face and feel of the “Muskoka” I once knew, and I’m only a 30-year resident, not a local.
As for mystery malls, how about the one across the road from the Bracebridge Home Depot. Try walking that de-forested land. You need your hands, because the broken rock is so large you can’t walk without clambering. Why was that desecration allowed; I mean, for what purpose?
Progress. Toward…
If we’re not part of our own plan, we’ll be part of someone else’s
I think this “mall” was to be at the south end of town, near where Ideal Algonquin ended up and now there is a whole mess of places there, from Fireplace King all the way out to Home Building center and everything in between.
There never turned out to be a “mall” however as the one we have now was built at the other end of town, Huntsville Place Mall.
Now none of this matters as we have the great and wonderful Wally mart, home desperate and all the rest in that flat space out by Hwy. 11
We can now shop till we drop but not so much in the old downtown core and I for one kind of miss the old downtown. Progress I suppose is the word to use.