The City of Markham has a specific phrase for what happened downtown on August 14. Announcing the Ontario Honda Dealers Indy at Markham, the city called it the largest sporting event ever hosted in York Region. That is not a marketing flourish easy to shrug off. It is the kind of claim a municipality makes once, about one weekend, when it means it.
The race itself backed up the billing, eventually. IndyCar built a 12-turn, 3.52-kilometre temporary street circuit through downtown Markham, wrapped around the Unionville GO station, to replace the series' longtime home on Toronto's Exhibition Place waterfront. It was the first IndyCar event ever run on Markham's streets, and the plan is for it to stay: the city, the private promoter Green Savoree Toronto ULC and IndyCar signed on for five years starting this summer, backed by a $3.5 million federal infrastructure investment aimed at getting Markham's roads and event facilities ready to host it again and again.
Getting ready for the first one, though, ran right up against its own deadline. Friday's practice sessions never happened. The asphalt was finished and matched the layout drivers had walked that morning, but the safety barriers and tire walls were not, and the event's own statement that evening pushed the day's on-track activity to Saturday instead. Sunday's race ran as scheduled, 90 laps over a longer course than IndyCar had used in Toronto, and Marcus Ericsson took the win for Andretti Global, his first NTT IndyCar Series victory since 2023.
A Second Long-Running Fixture Announces It's Moving
Three weeks after the checkered flag, a much quieter kind of change landed in Markham. On September 4, T&T Supermarket announced it is relocating its Unionville store, a location it has held for 14 years at 50,000 square feet, into the former Hudson's Bay space at CF Markville. The new store, at 68,000 square feet, will be the largest Asian grocery store in Markham once it opens in 2028. It is also T&T's fourth partnership with mall owner Cadillac Fairview, following similar moves into Fairview Mall, Sherway Gardens and Winnipeg's Polo Park.
That is not a small errand-route change for anyone who has built a Saturday around the Unionville store. It is a full-size anchor tenant leaving a 14-year address on Main Street's edge of the neighborhood for a mall two highway exits away, with a two-year construction runway before the new one opens. Whatever replaces T&T's current footprint in Unionville, and whatever fills the lower level at CF Markville in the meantime, is still an open question as of this writing.
The One Thing on the Calendar That Didn't Move
Against a summer of unfinished barriers and a supermarket packing up a 14-year lease, the Markham Fair opens October 1 exactly where it always does: the Markham Fairgrounds at 10801 McCowan Road, the same weekend before Thanksgiving the fair has claimed since it relocated there in 1977. This is the 182nd running of an event first held in 1844, which makes it one of the oldest country fairs in the country. In its entire run it has been cancelled exactly three times, for the two world wars and for COVID in 2020. It did not reschedule this year, and it is not expected to reschedule next year either.
That reliability is not an accident of tradition. It is a function of who owns the ground. The fair and its fairgrounds belong to the Markham and East York Agricultural Society, a private, member-governed corporation with 24 elected directors and more than 700 volunteers spread across over 70 committees, which the society itself describes as the largest community-based volunteer organization in Canada. Because the society owns the fairgrounds, the layout and the calendar carry over from one October to the next. The gates open on the same footprint every year.
Here is what that difference in ownership actually produces this fall:
| Who runs it | What went sideways in 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Ontario Honda Dealers Indy | City of Markham with Green Savoree Toronto ULC | Day one practice cancelled when safety infrastructure wasn't finished on schedule |
| T&T Supermarket relocation | Cadillac Fairview, in partnership with T&T | 14-year Unionville site closing, two-year gap before the CF Markville store opens |
| Markham Fair | Markham and East York Agricultural Society | Nothing. Same dates, same fairgrounds, 182nd year in a row |
What Actually Shows Up October 1 to 4
The fair itself is not a scaled-down version of anything. It runs Thursday through Sunday with gates open at 9 a.m. and the exhibit buildings staying open until 10 p.m. each night. What's on the ground:
- More than 40 midway rides, run by World's Finest Shows at the fairgrounds' west gate
- The Saturday night demolition derby, a fixture of the fair's entertainment lineup for years
- SuperDogs, horse and tractor pulls, and live cooking demonstrations
- Two farms selling produce on-site through all four days, for anyone doing a grocery run in the same trip
There is no shuttle bus this year, same as every year. The fair's own FAQ points visitors to the TTC as far as Markville Mall, at McCowan Road and Highway 7, and a rideshare for the last stretch to the fairgrounds. Adult admission runs $25, with a four-day pass at $50 and a family pass covering two adults and up to three children at $60.
The Roads Underneath All of This Have Had a Rough Year
None of this has happened on infrastructure that was sitting still. Warden Avenue, the north-south corridor a short drive from both the fairgrounds and the CF Markville site, opened a sinkhole south of Major Mackenzie Drive after heavy rain in early April, closing the road in both directions and detouring YRT's Route 68 bus onto Kennedy Road for the duration. That was layered on top of an existing culvert rehabilitation project on the same stretch of Warden that York Region has been running since the summer before, plus a separate preservation project between 14th and 16th Avenues scheduled to run into November. It has been, by any measure, an unusually disrupted year for the pavement under this city, even before a temporary street circuit got added to the mix downtown.
None of that touches the fairgrounds. The society's committees plan around a fixed October weekend on land the society itself owns. Owning the ground outright is what lets the fair keep its dates year after year, while the Indy, the CF Markville buildout and the Warden Avenue work are large projects that are new, still taking shape, and carried by the city, its partners and York Region.
What This Fall Actually Tells You About Markham
The city spent this year building something it had never hosted before and announcing that a familiar grocery anchor is leaving a 14-year home for a bigger one two exits away. Both are real signs of a place still growing into new infrastructure, and both came with the kind of last-minute scramble that new infrastructure tends to produce. The fair is the counterweight, not because nothing here is changing, but because one piece of it was built to answer to nobody but its own membership, and it shows.
If you're watching how Markham's growth this year, from the Indy's five-year commitment to the CF Markville buildout, might shift what a home near either of them is worth, Digalakis Real Estate has been tracking this market long enough to read past the headlines. Book a complimentary consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
