The mall officially opened with 51 stores and services; as well as an extensive underground parking garage; on July 30, 1970. One of its anchor tenants, Simpsons-Sears (
Sears Canada), opened for business in 1968, more than a year ahead of the rest of the mall, but closed in January 2018.
Eaton's was the mall's second anchor until that chain went out of business in the holiday season of 1999; The Bay (later branded Hudson's Bay) subsequently relocated to the mall from its corner of 2nd Avenue & 23rd Street standalone location. From its opening until its late-1980s renovation, the mall had a corridor connecting directly to the auditorium, which was usually utilized as an exit from the facility; there was also a corridor connecting the auditorium to the mall's parking garage. One early tenant of the mall was Midtown Cinema, the city's first mall-based movie theatre; it later split into two cinemas to become Saskatoon's first "multiplex"; the theatre closed in the spring of 2000 and its space was used for temporary retail and other exhibitions before being reallocated to other stores and parking. Another "day one" retailer was a franchise of the
Dominion grocery store chain, which operated in the mall until the chain pulled out of Saskatoon in the late 1980s; after a few years of short-term uses (including housing its popular Eaton's-sponsored Christmas lights display), the mall redeveloped the former Dominion store into a food court. The mall was originally one storey. By 1990, a second storey was added and the façade was altered to mimic the original 1900s railway station. This reconstruction cost . From the early 1970s until the early 2000s, the fifth floor of the office block housed the studios of the local
CBC Television owned-and-operated station
CBKST. A small "boutique" mall, Midtown Village, was developed in the late 1970s at the corner of 20th Street and Idylwyld Drive; initially a separate development from Midtown Plaza, it briefly came under the same ownership as the larger mall in the 1990s and was branded as part of Midtown Plaza for a time, before being demolished for additional parking. From 1993 to 2005, the mall owned and displayed a statue of Saskatchewan-born hockey player
Gordie Howe statue at the southwest corner of 1st Avenue South and 20th Street East. It was relocated to the
Credit Union Centre in 2005. Following the closure of the
Sears Canada chain in 2018, the mall began to redevelop the store's space into a new wing with a re-located food court known as Midtown Common, which opened on July 25, 2019. In November 2018, it was announced that the previous main-floor food court area would be redeveloped into an
MEC, as its first location in the province. In December 2019,
H&M announced that it would open a location at Midtown in 2020—its second in the province. MEC was originally projected to open in May 2020, but was delayed to late-2021 due to the
COVID-19 pandemic and other factors. As if summer 2025 the spot allocated for MEC remains vacant with no indication of being built. The new H&M store opened in December 2020. On June 1, 2025, Hudson’s Bay closed, as did all Hudson's Bay locations across Canada, leaving the mall with no large-format anchors (notwithstanding the standalone Toys R' Us). As of summer 2025 the mall had yet to announce its plans for the vacant Bay location. ==Anchor tenants==