Honest Ed's Marquee Series

by Matt Durant December 6, 2023

In 2017 I got my hands on 8 sections of the Honest Ed's marquee sign — among roughly 12 known to survive the teardown. I spent months trimming, framing, and rewiring them. Each one is ready to hang, aligned exactly as it sat in the original sign, framed in ebony-stained wood, plug-in ready, and lit with warm incandescent bulbs that are fully dimmable.

There are very few of these left in the world. This is most of them.

The pieces originally available are marked in green in the diagram below.

Honest Ed's Marquee series

Honest Ed's opened in 1948, founded by Ed and Anne Mirvish on Bloor Street in Toronto. Over the next seven decades it became one of the city's most recognizable landmarks — not just as a store, but as a presence. The marquee sign, built in 1984, featured over 23,000 light bulbs. You could see it from blocks away. It was loud and deliberate and completely itself.

Photo: The Toronto Archives

Ed Mirvish died in 2007. The store closed in 2016. In 2017 the sign came down.

As David Mirvish said at the time: "I think of businesses as having a life span just like humans, and for a retail store to last 75 years is a pretty healthy lifespan. In its day it was great."

Photo: Sean Galbraith

The demolition of the sign marked something real in Toronto — one of those moments where the city changes faster than people are ready for. Some sections were preserved as part of the Mirvish Village development that replaced the site. Most of the sign is simply gone.