Alexis Nihon Complex
Shopping, office and residential complex
Alexis Nihon Complex (French: Complexe Alexis Nihon) is a 223,000 m2 (2,400,000 sq ft) building complex situated at the border of Downtown Montreal and the neighbouring city of Westmount in Quebec, Canada. It consists of a shopping mall, two office towers, and a residential building. Although the complex is typically associated with Downtown Montreal and its main entrance on Atwater Avenue is in Montreal proper, more than 80% of the land it occupies is located in Westmount. It is named after the inventor and businessman Alexis Nihon. The shopping mall is directly connected to the Atwater metro station, which joins the building by a short tunnel with the adjacent Dawson College, and by a longer one adjoins nearby Westmount Square. The original complex was designed by the Montreal architect Harold Ship, and its architectural plans are housed at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Construction of Alexis Nihon Plaza, as the complex was originally called, began in September 1965. The shopping mall inaugurated on April 17, 1967, but its stores didn't actually start doing business until the next day (with the notable exception of one retailer that had opened a day in advance by mistake). It was the first shopping centre in North America with three levels. The Miracle Mart store occupied all three levels of the shopping mall at 270,000 sq ft (25,000 m2), making it the largest of the retailer's locations at the time.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alexis Nihon Complex” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.