Final signoff for Toronto landmark
Removal of Honest Ed’s sign underway, will find new home on Ed Mirvish Theatre
Way back when I was a journalism student, I thought up an idea for a story on whomever it was who had to change the light bulbs in the Honest Ed’s sign. All those little bulbs, blinking away, tended to by whoknows-who?
I never pursued it. But for a couple of decades it sat there in my mind, waiting for a rainy day. Now, here he is in front of me, the guy. In a manner of speaking.
“I worked on it, rewiring all of the bulbs in the 1980s, when they decided to change to an electronic flasher system,” Everton Ingleton, a 44-year employee of Pattison Sign Group tells me, standing at the corner of Markham St. and Bloor. So, see, he did change the light bulbs, once, though not in the way I was thinking of. Others at the company did that job. “There was a service crew did that maintenance, come around, replace the bulbs when they burnt out,” Ingleton says. It’s been a while since anyone did that. And no one will any more.
Tuesday morning, Ingleton and I were among a crowd of a few dozen people who assembled to watch as the famous Honest Ed’s sign began to be taken down.
“It’s going to be a loss for the city,” Ingleton said. “And it was a showcase for the company.” The biggest incandescent sign project most employees there would ever work on, that’s for sure. “You’d spend a lot of hours getting it ready, especially for the holidays when Mr. Mirvish would want it looking good.”
Specifically, one of the five sections that bore the store’s giant logo — in red, white and yellow circus type embedded with blinking lights and surrounded by a swirling border — was being removed carefully, in pieces. The section weighs about 8,000 to 10,000 pounds, and comes apart off the wall in 10 pieces. Two crane trucks and a small crew of hard-hatted workers spent hours taking it down.
This would then be transported to Pattison’s Orillia offices to be gently tended to. It wouldn’t be repaired or restored, per se, but preserved in its current state — rust spots treated, holes filled in for safety and preservation purposes, the faded, oxidized and flaked paint covered in a clear coat to prevent further deterioration.
In perhaps a year, it will be re-hung on the side of the Ed Mirvish Theatre on Victoria St. as a memorial to the store. The next chapter in the beloved former discount retailer’s goodbye to the city.
Some of the other parts of the famous assembly of signs will be taken down and saved in the months to come by WestBank, the developer working on the site, to be preserved in the new development. Others are being offered to business associations and other organizations in the city. Much of what remains will be scrapped. Then, sometime in the summer, the Honest Ed’s buildings themselves will come down.
Pattison, which provided many such signs around the city, now does a business in taking down and preserving them, company project management and customer service manager Bob Zincone told me.
They’re working on this one, and later this month they’ll remove the Hard Rock Café sign and giant guitar overhanging Yonge St. They did the neon 1050 CHUM sign, moving it from its former Yonge and St. Clair home to its current location at Adelaide and Duncan. They did the Tip Top Tailors sign that was re-hung on the condo loft conversion on Lake Shore. In storage in Orillia, they have the famous Inglis Home Appliances billboard that lit up the Gardiner with its inspirational phrases, waiting to be remounted somewhere, sometime.
I mention that I’ve been to the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, and heard of neon museum in Las Vegas. In Toronto, we seem to be collecting them to remount on the street — making the city itself the sign museum. “Yeah, a lot of people who see this sign remember coming here as a kid — they look at it and feel a lot of emotion,” Zincone says. “These signs kind of tell the history of the city.”
On hand to see the sign come down was a man who was there when it went up — and was involved with it even before that. John Jeppesen was the Pattison salesman sold who all the outdoor signs to Honest Ed back in the 1980s when they replaced older, less flashy versions.
“I had many meetings with Mr. Mirvish leading up to the design and installation. He was a very hands-on person, and he had a vision, so he provided me with some doodles of what he wanted.”
A colleague shows me a photocopy of those Mirvish hand-drawn concept doodles — the originals have been given back to the Mirvish family for the archives — outlining the vision. The scroll borders are there with instructions calling for “double row running light” along them, and there are notations suggesting colours (“red on yellow?”) and some of his famous slogans — “World Famous Bargain House” and “Don’t Just Stand There, Buy Something.”
“Mr. Mirvish said he wanted a Las Vegas-style display, bigger than anything that’s ever been done before. A landmark,” Jeppesen says.
The whole package of signs — five of these giant logo panels, a few long “World Famous” pieces, the series of small, punny slogan segments, and all the rest of that famous wraparound marquee — was installed as a single order, Jeppesen says. It took weeks to put them up. Jeppesen had to work with city council because no existing sign bylaw at the time could apply to something like this. He recalls the concession that Mirvish would need to turn off the lights at night, so the neighbours would have some chance of sleeping.
“There’s a whole lot of memories there,” he says.
Is he emotional, watching it come down after all these years? “It’s certainly historical. And in some ways emotional. I guess it goes back many years.”
He says on the emotion front, he felt a lot more when Mirvish passed on in 2007. The memories he has of working on the sign are of going out into the street with Mirvish to look at things, where it would always “take forever” because everyone always wanted to talk to Ed and he was always happy to talk to them — “That was my joy working on this. He was a real gentleman, who lived a great life.”
When Mirvish passed away, that was an emotional day, he says. This one is more a historic change. The sign, after all, will live on at the theatre that bears Mirvish’s name. “I think it’s a great idea, preserving it there. It’ll always be there.” Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire