A bowtie. A Barack Obama commemorative plastic sack. Nine pairs of tube socks at $2.99 per 3-pak (sic). A dustpan. A free turkey. A pair of $20 dress shoes bought for a wedding as the cab waited outside. Shabbat candles. A toy Titanic that transforms into a robot. Many, many gold Elvis busts.
Ask Torontonians to name their favourite purchase from the Honest Ed’s department store, and you rapidly compile a compendium of kitsch to fascinate any anthropologist from the future. The most prized artefact, of course, should be the store itself – a garish, ramshackle funhouse that for decades held the world record for most electric lights on a building – were it not for the fact that Honest Ed’s is slated for demolition on New Years’ Eve, 2016.
When the dust settles at the start of 2017, Toronto will be one more mixed-use residential-retail complex richer. Gone, however, will be a store that didn’t just sell cheap formalwear and ironic birthday gifts to hipsters, but was central to Toronto’s proud history as one of the great immigrant cities.
The “world’s biggest discount shop” was the flagship of a Toronto retail and cultural empire that began in earnest in 1948, when Ed Mirvish – the US-born son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Austria – overhauled the ladieswear outlet he ran with his wife, Anne, by buying the salvaged stock from a Woolworth’s department store that had burned down in nearby Hamilton. So began Mirvish’s memorable strategy of selling random bulk merchandise bought from fire and bankruptcy sales, piled on crates under vaguely abusive signs with messages such as “Come in you lucky people”.
The store’s approach to retail can perhaps best be described as “confuse and disorientate”. In this, as in so many other ways, it was a trailblazer. Mirvish set up mirrors everywhere on the uneven floors, lured in buyers with giveaways and below-cost discounts on selected items – he apparently claimed to have invented the “loss leader” – and covered the exterior in thousands of coloured lightbulbs and corny hand-painted signs, such as “Honest Ed is for the birds … but his prices are cheep! cheep!” The sales strategy, meanwhile, was spelled out plainly: “Come in and get lost.”
The “cheep” prices also immediately attracted a vast customer base: recent immigrants who’d arrived in Canada with more hope than money. Each morning, Mirvish gave away “gifts” to the first few customers through the doors (to this day, a determined and shivering few line up at 6am on the corner of Bloor and Bathurst to claim their free tuning fork or toaster), as well as dollar bills to the poor and turkeys before Thanksgiving and Christmas. He employed in-store “greeters” – another innovation – for new customers and generally made the new-world consumer dream real for Canadians, and in the process helped turn Toronto into the powerhouse of immigrant-driven commerce it became.
It’s pleasant to fantasise that if Mirvish hadn’t died in 2007, the building would never have been sold for scrap – but Ed’s defining characteristic wasn’t so much honesty as a hard nose. As the store grew, Mirvish bought up neighbouring Victorian buildings with the intention of tearing them down to create a car park. The city stopped him. So he rented out the properties to artists, and inadvertently spawned a bohemian community that became known as Mirvish Village; a home to galleries, comic stores, restaurants, antique shops and that alternative-culture landmark, Suspect Video.
Mirvish cemented his status as cultural hero by becoming a theatre impresario, refurbishing the Royal Alexandra Theatre in 1963 (another supposedly unviable building slated for the wrecking ball) and the Old Vic in London, which went on to enjoy a golden age, and for which Mirvish was awarded a CBE.
After his death, the city’s then-mayor David Miller named 12 August “Ed Mirvish Day” in Toronto. But by then land prices had already begun their stomach-churning ascent, making downtown unaffordable to most immigrants. The surviving Mirvishes found themselves with a huge store that was losing its customers, while the value of its real estate went through the leaking roof. The party was never going to last.
The developer who bought the site, Westbank, has proposed a series of multi-storey towers with apartments and a glass-covered market. But regardless of what specific plan finally gets approved, when Toronto’s immigrant landmark is transformed into the inevitable chain-retail, street-level mall, and the existing eateries of Mirvish Village are thrust into their new role as what the Globe and Mail breathlessly describes as “destination restaurants”, one of the ventricles of indie Toronto’s heart will shrivel.
- Which other buildings in the world tell stories about urban history? Share your own pictures and descriptions with GuardianWitness, on Twitter and Instagram using #hoc50 or let us know suggestions in the comments below
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