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2024: Wexford Blooms 2gether

Toronto strip mall to host free night market inspired by Indian subcontinent

By Etti Bali

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Scarborough is set to have its first taste of a one-of-a-kind night market experience, thanks to an initiative by plazaPOPS at Wexford Heights, which works to transform strip mall parking spaces into public gathering spaces that promote small businesses, culture and community.

The upcoming Wexford Dhaba is poised to be a night market and fair, or mela, that celebrates the food and culture of the diaspora from the Indian subcontinent.

It promises to host a variety of local vendors, restaurants and musicians. Handcrafted wares and cuisine from across the Indian subcontinent, like panipuri, will be among the offerings.

Local musicians from the Toronto-based South Asian music group Virasat Collective as well as Syrian band Diar will provide live music and entertainment.

Dhabas were pit stops that sprouted along the trade route connecting Kabul in Afghanistan to Punjab, Delhi, and Chittagong in the Indian subcontinent in the 1940s to serve food to long-haul truck drivers.

They depended on these establishments for food, rest, and bathroom breaks before continuing the journey. Some of the states were partitioned when the British left India and became part of what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The cultural legacy of dhabas, however, remained unpartitioned.

These dhabas operate 24/7 and serve rustic local fare that’s tasty and nourishing for the body and soul. A fixture of dhabas is the tandoor, or clay oven fed with hot coals, in which a variety of rotis (or flatbreads) are cooked and served with dollops of freshly churned white butter, curries and a side of the most authentic vernacular music that exists only on the cassette players of truck and lorry drivers.

The ambience is in sync with the utilitarian nature of a dhaba’s purpose. Plastic chairs, jute-rope charpoys and vibrant truck art dominate the landscape of a dhaba. Today, however, many dhabas have revamped themselves into brick-and-mortar restaurants to cater to the cosmopolitan urban traveller.

This is not the first time that plazaPOPs has planned an initiative around turning strip malls into places of cultural confluence. The team has successfully executed community pop-ups in north Etobicoke and a garden pop-up called WexPOPs at Wexford Heights Plaza.

The event will be held on July 27 from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at Wexford Blooms 2gether hub site, 2020 Lawrence Ave. E.

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2023: Wexford Blooms

A Toronto strip mall parking lot is being converted into an outdoor movie theatre

By Kimia Afshar Mehrabi

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While strip malls are ordinarily where you’d pick up a piping hot meal, pay a visit to your dentist, or grab an icy drink from a convenience store, one plaza in Toronto is having its parking lot converted into an outdoor movie theatre soon. 

Led by the local community, plazaPOPs is an organization that supports the transformation of strip mall parking lots into free, safe, and accessible gathering places that support small businesses in the area. 

Their next project at the Wexflord Plaza in Scarborough invites you to a double-bill film screening under the stars and surrounded by the “dynamic lights of the strip mall signage.” 
The screening will include two movies about the strip mall itself — with “Wexford Plaza” being the feature film of the night. 

The flick, directed by Toronto-based Joyce Wong, immerses audiences in the lives of two distinct characters — a disillusioned security guard and a charismatic bartender. 

“As their paths intertwine in unexpected ways, ‘Wexford Plaza’ delves into themes of longing, connection, and the search for meaning, offering a poignant and authentic portrayal of the human experience and life in Scarborough,” a description of the film reads. 

“The Wexford” documentary, directed by Michael Barry, is set to play before the feature film. The heartwarming documentary sheds light on the Wexford Restaurant, a Scarborough landmark operated by three generations of the Kiriakou family. 

“This heartfelt film celebrates the enduring legacy of the Wexford Restaurant and its significant role in bringing people together through food, stories, and laughter, and is an homage to the restaurant that closed its doors after 63 years in 2020,” a description of the documentary says. 

This year, plazaPOPS has also partnered with the Working Women Community Centre and the Wexford Heights BIA to deliver four installations along Lawrence Ave East, which will be installed and programmed until the end of October 2023.

In the spirit of supporting local businesses, plazaPOPS is encouraging attendees to patronize the Wexford Heights BIA’s array of restaurants to purchase treats for the screening. 

The completely-free event is open to all, and you’re invited to bring your own lawn chairs or grab a seat at the WexPOPs installation in the parking lot. 

The event takes place on Tuesday, Aug. 8 at 8 p.m. at 2072 Lawrence Ave E.

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2022: ThistlePOPS

Barren Toronto parking lots have been transforming into inviting pop-up parks

By Jack Landau

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Congested suburban strip mall parking lots are the last place one would expect to encounter pockets of foot and cycling traffic, but for the past few years, some of these car-dominated pedestrian wastelands have been shedding that identity thanks to an ongoing initiative known as plazaPOPS.

The brainchild of Brendan Stewart and Karen Landman, who are both professors of Landscape Architecture at the University of Guelph, as well as author/cartographer Daniel Rotsztain, the project was spearheaded in a 2019 pilot transforming surface parking at Wexford Heights Plaza in Scarborough into an inviting pedestrian environment.

This first installation, known as WexPOPS, occupied just ten parking spots, but its success has created an appetite for even more community pop-ups in other suburban neighbourhoods across Toronto.

In the years since, plazaPOPS — named in a fusion of the strip plazas being transformed with privately-owned public spaces, or POPS — has taken its community-led, low-cost process to lots with an aim to create free and accessible spaces to address a lack of amenities for pedestrians and transit users.

This group of four parking lots spread throughout the Albion Islington Square BIA in North Etobicoke has been repurposed into community spaces until Oct. 24 in a partnership with the Rexdale Community Hub and local BIA.

It may run counter to trends of urban intensification, but pop-up spaces like these actually embrace the conditions of the inner suburbs. Instead of drastically changing the engrained way of life, they open up areas not necessarily designed with foot traffic in mind to new users while supporting businesses hard hit by two years of rolling lockdowns.

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2019: WexPOPS

Toronto strip malls are about to get more interesting

By Tanya Mok

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Hanging out in the parking lot of a Toronto strip mall may not be your idea of a good time, but it could be this summer.


The exterior of Wexford Heights Plaza (the Scarborough strip mall of film festival fame) just got a big upgrade thanks to a new initiative called plazaPOPS.

The project, which aims to transform the drab areas around suburban strip malls into vibrant community spaces, launched its pilot project WexPOPS today, transforming the plaza parking lot into a little green oasis.

Planters with over 300 plants, including blooming sunflowers and edible herbs, tables, and comfy seats complete with umbrellas and twinkle lights at night now sit on the asphalt across from the diner mainstay Wexford Restaurant.


“As the city densifies, a lot of these strip malls are going to be demolished,” says Daniel Rotsztain (known online as the Urban Geographer) whose Masters thesis was the jump-off point for PlazaPOPS.

“The project was born out of a desire to think about how to urbanize the inner suburbs while working with the existing vibrancy, instead of erasing what’s there.”



According to Rotsztain, the number-one request from local residents and businesses during the consultation process was a green space with more plants.

Led by University of Guelph professors Brendan Stewart and Karen Landman, the $75,000 is the first in what PlazaPOPS hopes will be more pop-up oases in BIAs across the city.

Funded by the Park People’s Public Space Incubator Grant and the City’s Kickstart grant, WexPOPS even has a restaurant directory at the pop-up, with a map that lists all the places to eat in the area.

If you’re heading to Taste of Lawrence this weekend, you’ll be able to see a stage for performances organized by Scarborough Arts, and a mural depicting food culture in the Wexford area by Toronto artist Echo Railton.

“The whole point of this is to support the local businesses while accomplishing city goals,” says Rotsztain. “Small businesses are so important to our identity and to lots of communities in the city.”

WexPOPS will sit at this corner of Warden and Lawrence until August 18.



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PlazaPOPS is funded by the City of Toronto’s Main Street Recovery and Rebuild Initiative, as part of Government of Canada support through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario).

Research for plazaPOPS is funded through a SSHRC Partnership Development grant, in partnership with the City of Toronto and the University of Guelph’s School of Environmental Design and Rural Development (SEDRD) in the Ontario Agricultural College.