The homely handle was an important legacy of Ed Mirvish's early life in Washington. Honest Yehuda's doesn't have the same ring, so it's just as well that a member of the Mirvish clan changed the boy's name to Edwin at a young age. The words might be carved on Honest Ed's tombstone if it had one. Mirvish said, sitting at a glass-topped boardroom table in his King Street West office, the week before Christmas. Wal-Mart and its big-box imitators were culprits in chief, but they had accomplices: Internet shopping, a spruced-up downtown and the diffusion of Toronto's working class among them. Then it stopped growing and started doing the opposite. Since its launch in 1948, with fire-sale stock and screaming signs, the store hardly changed.
#THE ED STORE TV#
That will be sad for heritage boosters, inconvenient for the shrunken cadre of Honest Ed's shoppers and painful for the surrounding Mirvish tenants who face eviction.Ĭrowds outside Honest Ed’s in downtown Toronto, November 11, 1984, wait to see American TV celebrity Mr. T.īut Ed's heir casts the move as something else: inevitable. Eventually, a complex of apartments and modern shops will stand there, every sleek pane of glass mocking its predecessor on the corner. Memories, and a husk of a building, are all that will be left at Bathurst and Bloor Streets by the new year. "I wanted them to have a memory of Honest Ed's," Mr. On a recent visit, he bought about 100 of the cupcake-shaped egg timers as keepsakes for his employees at Mirvish Productions, the behemoth theatre company that supplanted discount retail at the heart of his business empire a long time ago. But he hasn't been able to resist a few fond, parting glances. In its terminal weeks, David has been trying to avoid the place and the flood of nostalgia it triggers. Mirvish, the store is practically flesh and blood: His father, Ed Mirvish, founded Honest Ed's nearly 70 years ago and raised his son amid its crooked floors and byzantine stairways. Even an hour after the doors opened the line still stretched around the entire block which Ed’s sits upon. A large crowd of people waited in line, inside and out, to have a chance to purchase some of the many hand-made signs at Honest Ed’s in Toronto on March 10, 2014.
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