Alberni Mall is an outdoor shopping mall located in Port Alberni, British Columbia. Formerly an indoor mall until April 15, 2007, major renovation and redevelopment of the former mall complex began in the spring of that year, and it will most likely also be renamed as part of its updating. History In 1977, Royal Oak Holdings, a Vancouver-based company which had recently opened the Ironwood Mall in Campbell River, British Columbia, were approached by a group of Port Alberni citizens about building an indoor mall in their city. At the time, Port Alberni was one of the few larger towns in British Columbia that did not have an indoor mall. The proposition received support from then-Port Alberni mayor Jim Robertson, the city's council, the Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District, and major retailers. A twin movie theatre and two banks were included as part of the proposed mall's original plans, but those plans were dropped prior to the beginning of the construction phase. The mall's site, a then-wooded area located on the southeast corner of Johnston and Cherry Creek Roads, was cleared in summer 1978 and construction began in August that year. The mall was completed and opened for the first time as the Alberni Mall on May 30, 1979, with 42 stores and services, including original anchor tenants Safeway and Kmart while other retailers in the beginning included Fields, Boots Drug Mart, Peoples Jewellers, and Orange Julius. In later years, Boots (which closed its Canadian stores in the 1980s) was replaced at the mall by People's Drug Mart, and eventually by Pharmasave, while Sears Canada had a dealer store in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Alberni Mall prospered through the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, but hard times began to befall the mall beginning in 1996, when Safeway closed its location at the mall on November 14, although they retained their lease; rather than let a competing supermarket chain take over their former space, Safeway opted to sub-lease it to Liquidation World. In 1998, the Canadian stores of Kmart were purchased by the Hudson's Bay Company, with the intent of turning most of them into Zellers stores and closing the rest. One of the stores HBC chose to close was the Alberni Mall Kmart, which was subsequently demolished to make way for a new Canadian Tire, which opened on November 1 that year. The mall eventually went into further decline