Linda Wang operated Fine European Tailoring in Westgate Mall for the better part of two decades. Then she had to walk away.
Linda Wang almost blends into her space as she works away, tailoring clothing in her cramped, single-room business. Clothes draped in plastic dry cleaner bags hang from pipes and poles. Wang operates a sewing machine with a careful and practised choreography — she eases the thread through a pair of pants, just slightly too long for its owner, manually turning the needle through the fabric with her right hand while guiding with her left. A press of her foot on the floor pedal whirrs the machine to life, filling her store with a familiar rhythmic thunk.
Overhead industrial lights illuminate a wall of colourful threads spanning the entire length of the three machines she has set up on two desks. Wang says her store has looked this way since she first bought it.
The Evening Citizen
When the mall first opened to the public in 1955, Westgate Shopping Centre promised a futuristic shopping experience. And for the better part of the past two decades, Wang has been the owner-operator of Fine European Tailoring. The neon sign above her storefront carries the previous owner’s business name, a woman Wang says she almost volunteered to learn from.
At least the sign used to be there. Last October, Ottawa’s oldest shopping mall closed its doors for good.
Foot traffic in malls had been decreasing steadily even before the pandemic, according to data from Deloitte. And when COVID-19 lockdowns began, shopping centres were the hardest hit of all retail spaces, according to a 2024 report from Cushman & Wakefield.
Westgate Mall struggled to recover.
Before the pandemic, Wang worked eight and a half hours a day, six days a week. Post-pandemic, she reduced her hours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and took both Sunday and Monday off.
A steady stream of customers arrived at Wang’s counter during one of her final days here. Jennifer Kwavnick brought her 12-year-old daughter, Anna, to get a dress shortened. As Anna put the dress on, Wang and Kwavnick chat like old friends – the challenges of parenting, the differences in the stages of raising children — all while Wang works on another customer’s pants. Anna pops out of the change-room and Wang gets to work. Examining the dress, what length it falls to, and always asking Anna what she wants first.
Wang is not finding alternative retail space like many of the other tenants. She opted to retire — taking some of her work home for a select number of clients — because rent at an equivalent space is too expensive. For many in the neighbourhood, the loss of the mall is devastating, even more so to lose Wang’s handicraft.
“She was the only person who could do invisible mending and so I began taking things to her and she was really good, really kind, and over the years we established a good connection,” says Victoria Fuller, a frequent and favourite customer of Wang’s. “I don’t know how you replace it and a lot of people don’t have her skills.”
One of Wang’s specialties is invisible mending. The process involves the complicated weaving of threads to close holes, leaving no indication of any repair work. Wang remembers working on sweaters that were over 100 years old, entirely for the sentimentality that the piece held for its owner. She has even received packages as far as the Maritimes, hoping to have new life brought to their clothing.
For the people who frequented Westgate, the loss of the mall is a sad reality of a changing retail landscape. “It was an all-service type location,” says Mary McGrath, who was a regular at the mall for close to 40 years. Mary Ellen Hackett has been trying to visit Carlingwood Mall, a similar enclosed shopping space a few kilometres down the road. But for Hackett, the loss of Westgate Mall is still hard on her. “I’m a senior citizen, it’s nice to be able to make the walk over,” she says, “I used to go here to get my haircut.”
Wang, meanwhile, continues to work up until the last possible day. She wants to be there for her customers, just in case someone needs a last-second alteration.
But in the late afternoon on Oct. 30, her sewing machines shut off for the final time at Westgate Shopping Centre. Quietly, Wang begins cleaning up her store, extra pieces of denim, boxes of pins and buttons, bags of clothes and fabrics. She talks about all the lovely people she met over her career here. “I’m very very happy,” she says about her time at her store.
The next day the sewing machines, the leftover clothes and tools were moved out of the mall. With the store gutted and her Fine European Tailoring neon sign still illuminated, Wang left behind years of hard work and relationships.
