New Roots & Rising Tensions

In the early 1980s, brothers Daniel and Henry Hung, young men who grew up in Agincourt, bought land on Glen Watford Drive. They transformed a skating rink and baseball diamond into Dragon Centre Mall, the first Chinese indoor shopping mall in North America for the growing Chinese population. This mall was unique—it blended the packed markets of Hong Kong with the shopping centres of North America, influencing how ethnic malls were designed in the Greater Toronto Area.

Dragon Centre Mall, then known as New Chinese Mall, when it first opened in 1985.

The growth of Chinese-owned businesses led to increased tensions in the neighbourhood. The narrow roads and lack of parking spaces, for example, made neighbourhoods busy and hard to drive through. Some Non-Asian residents and merchants started to complain during neighbourhood meetings, accusing the new Chinese businesses for disturbing their once-quiet neighbourhood.

Headline speaking to Scarborough’s unpreparedness for expanding business and traffic pressures.

Coverage of the public meeting that convened in May of 1984.

After Dragon Centre was built and began attracting more customers to the neighbourhood, cars overflowed onto the streets, causing people in the neighbourhood to argue over parking spaces. These arguments were not just about the parking spaces, though, and instead were based on racism and intolerance towards the Chinese community and their businesses. Howard Tam, an urban planner who grew up in Agincourt, remembers the racist hate that was shared at the time.

I went to some of those meetings as a kid with my mom and I remember many people going up to the mic and saying really vile things like, ‘Learn English we’re in Canada,’ or ‘We don’t want Hong Kong here,’ and other attacks against the Chinese community.

– Howard Tam, urban planner and Agincourt resident

News article from the Globe & Mail documenting racial tensions.

The same year, a community meeting was held to talk about the traffic problem caused by Dragon Centre. However, it turned into a space where people expressed hate towards the Chinese community instead of resolving traffic issues. Even worse, racist pamphlets were spread throughout the neighbourhood, blaming the Chinese community for the noise and traffic. To combat racism, many people wrote letters to newspapers, defending the Chinese community and saying they weren’t to blame for the traffic mess.

A Toronto Star headline highlighting community support of the Chinese community, despite tensions.