Today Sport Chek opens in the downtown building that used to house beloved bookstore McNally Robinson.

I lamented the bookstore's absence in a column last week. After the column ran, I was contacted by the Encorp Group, the property management company that sold the building to McNally Robinson five years ago. (Encorp does a lot of work with historical buildings — for example, they own Art Central and the storied Alberta Hotel building downtown.)

Here's what Encorp president David Neill has to say about McNally's departure from Calgary: "Bad corporate citizenship, pure and simple." 

What follows is the backstory as told by Neill. Encorp bought the Clarence Block building in 1998, and soon afterwards, actively courted McNally Robinson as a possible tenant. "I went to Winnipeg half a dozen times to pitch them on it — and landed them," recalls Neill.

McNally Robinson had a 20-year lease on the building, according to Neill. "Two years in, they approached us and asked to buy." Neill knew the company was making a profit at the store because under the lease, McNally had to report its sales — and they were reporting profitability.

Yet Encorp was wary of selling because if McNally owned the building, they'd have the ability to close and sell to whomever they liked. "We actually gave it a lot of thought," says Neill. Ultimately, Encorp decided to sell for $5 million. "We gave them an excellent deal because our interest was getting them to be an anchor on Stephen Avenue."

The rationale was that if McNally Robinson could draw shoppers onto Stephen Avenue, it would benefit other retail outlets in the area (including the ones housed in Encorp's other properties).

Then, as real estate prices skyrocketed in 2007, McNally turned around and sold the building for more than $8 million. They made more than $3 million and left town, focusing on new stores in Winnipeg and Toronto.

Neill was surprised and unimpressed, to say the least. He e-mailed inner-city aldermen to let them know that "the worst is happening, really only due to opportunism on the part of McNally in our heated real estate market."

Like many other Calgarians, Neill now laments the lack of a large downtown bookstore in Calgary. "If we thought they were going to sell the store, we wouldn't have sold it." 

On the other hand, he acknowledges that the situation could be worse. Sport Chek, at least, is retail. "At least it didn't become offices."