Oriental Plaza exists because a community was moved, and then refused to disappear. Under apartheid-era removals, traders were pushed out of Pageview — the area everyone knew as Fietas — where 14th Street had been a working shopping street for generations. The Plaza, opened in the mid-1970s on the edge of Fordsburg, was where they were permitted to trade instead.
What kept it alive is what still makes it unusual: the shops are largely owned by the traders themselves rather than leased from a landlord chasing a national tenant mix. That ownership structure is the throughline from the centre's first difficult decade to the over 300 stores trading here today.