My
first time at Honest Ed’s, I got lost. I had just moved to Toronto and walked
down the street to check out the monstrous, garish store on the corner near my
new apartment. It beckoned me at night with its flashing circus lights and
stupid joke signs. How does a place like this even exist? I walked through
housewares and continued up and down stairs, only starting to panic when it
seemed as though I was going in circles. Hadn’t I seen that display of Lady’s
Fashion Leggings before?
But
it may be Honest Ed’s turn to be lost—at least, its physical presence now that owner David Mirvish has announced he has sold the property to Westbank, a
Vancouver-based developer (which, interestingly, is responsible for the redevelopment of another iconic department store, Woodward's, in Vancouver).
I’ve
learned in my three and a half years in Toronto that if you mention Honest Ed’s
you should be prepared for a story. Whether it’s someone’s first encounter with
the store, the way their mother used to eat fries and gravy in the basement, or
how they furnished their new apartment with its cheap products, every
Torontonian seems to have a little nook carved out in their brain filled with
hand-painted signs, light bulbs and weird Elvis busts.
But
in the face of inevitable urban change, how does the city itself remember?
Is
it enough to preserve the iconic sign? Does it need to be the whole sign or
just a bit of it? Any preservation of a part of the former store or sign would
certainly only serve a metaphorical purpose, an evocation of the something
larger that was once there. A fragment like that may simply collapse under its
own weight.
Should
we just march blindly forward with a clean slate and post a bronze plaque out
front with a few words like some sort of gravestone? How do you fashion
something to hold all those memories in place and do you even need to?
No
doubt all these and more will be discussed, debated, shouted and written about
to death over the next few years. For some, preserving just a part of the whole
is worse than doing nothing, while others may hold on to whatever fragment they
can get with dear life. There are people who scrapbook and there are people who
don’t.
What
I do know is that when I walk by the corner 30 years from now, dodging the
hover cars and walking my genetically-modified meowl, I will be
able to point to whatever building lies on the corner and say that’s where I
got lost by the Lady’s Fashion Leggings.
