Abandoned Toronto department store is now being reduced to rubble

A shuttered Hudson's Bay location in Toronto is now being reduced to rubble. 

After roughly one year of abandonment, the former Centerpoint Mall location of the fallen department store brand is being razed to make way for a TTC expansion project, set to extend the Line 1 subway's Yonge portion north into the suburbs.

The large department store opened at Centerpoint Mall back in 1974, and served customers at the busy shopping centre for just shy of a half-century before the retailer permanently closed all stores and ceased operations in June, 2025.

Early demolition work for the abandoned department store kicked off in June, and the job has since advanced to the first signs of the exterior teardown stage.

A portion of the building facade has been ripped away, and removed interior elements can be seen piled high just below this opening.

Full teardown of the building's structural skeleton and exterior facades is expected to accelerate significantly once the last of the interior elements are ripped away and hauled off-site.

The shuttering of The Bay locations across Canada was rather convenient, as the Centerpoint site can now easily accommodate construction of the Yonge North Subway Extension (YNSE) project, which will carry the TTC's Line 1 Yonge leg north from its current terminus at Finch.

Demolition permits for The Bay's east wing of the mall were filed back in February, and Metrolinx announced in June that teardown of the abandoned two-storey building was imminent.

The YNSE will extend the Yonge leg of the Line 1 subway north from the current northeast terminus at Finch Station into Vaughan, Markham, and Richmond Hill, adding five stations along approximately eight kilometres of new track.

The $5.6-billion subway extension project has been racing through construction milestones over the past several months, and, with demolition at the Centerpoint site clearing a path for more construction, work is only set to ramp up further in the weeks and months to come.

Metrolinx has not announced a completion date for the Line 1 extension, but it joins a generational wave of transit expansion in Toronto and the surrounding region — one that will cost us some brick-and-mortar retail along the way.