“Welcome, don’t faint at our low prices, there’s no place to lie down.”

When I last shopped at Honest Ed’s, the bargain basement decor didn’t have quite the charm I remembered from my youth.

The discount store at Bloor and Bathurst Sts. is an institution. But corporate dollar-store chains with tidy aisles and bright lighting have made cheap and cheerful a commodity available in every neighbourhood.

You don’t have to go to Ed’s anymore. Yet the store that “Honest” Ed Mirvish started in 1948 looms ever large in the Canadian public consciousness, even as it is set to close this December.

Expect to see much eulogizing closer to the end of the year. But the Americans are taking first crack. On Friday at 8 p.m., PBS (WNED Buffalo) takes a look at the legacy that Mirvish begat in Toronto’s First Family of Theatre.

A transplanted American, the late Edwin Mirvish opened Honest Ed’s after cashing in his wife Anne’s $200 life insurance policy.

“When I first came (to Toronto) it was less than half a million people. It was a city of homes and churches, but it was a dull city,” says Mirvish in archival footage.

With his garish, carnival-barker style of promotion, hosting dance-a-thons, painting elephants pink and putting clowns in bands — Mirvish was anything but dull.

The 30-minute documentary covers a lot of ground, using early footage and interviews with Mirvish’s son David along with commentary by former Toronto Star theatre critic Richard Ouzounian, columnist Martin Knelman and stage luminaries Shirley Douglas and the late Michael Burgess.

It is a mostly celebratory look at the impact the Mirvishes have had on the city — so don’t expect a critical Nightline examination of skeletons in the closet.

But it’s a pat on the back that is hard to begrudge. Mirvish, for all his over-the-top promoting, was not a hard man to like. And his soft-spoken, always courtly son David seems like a chip off the old block in substance, if not in style.

The revenues from Honest Ed’s would fuel a theatre empire, starting with the purchase in 1963 of the Royal Alexandra Theatre, the oldest continuously running theatre in North America. Mirvish, on the prodding of his wife Anne, purchased the theatre for $215,000 and poured $600,000 into renovations.

“If I had known anything about theatre, I probably wouldn’t have touched it,” says Mirvish, who would go on to build the Princess of Wales Theatre and purchase two other venues in Toronto. David Mirvish half-jokingly says that his father spent 90 per cent of his efforts running the theatre business, for maybe 5 per cent of the total revenues from his shops, restaurants and other businesses.

“He said theatre was a disease and I’ve caught it,” David says.

Strangely, there is no mention of the 1982 purchase of the famed Old Vic in England. The Mirvishes sold it 16 years later after suffering major losses, but it was a significant and audacious move by a member of the colonies to purchase such a landmark cultural property. There is also no mention of the theatre wars between foes such as Garth Drabinsky’s Livent empire or Aubrey Dan’s Dancap incursion. But perhaps that’s for another show.

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What is undisputed is that after Honest Ed’s closes, his legacy still looms large. Ambitious plans are afoot to transform the skyline of Toronto with David’s passion project, a pair of towers designed by Frank Gehry.

Ed’s neon vision of Toronto may vanish, but it will be replaced by the sensibilities of another Mirvish.

“As people, we have a life cycle and so do businesses. Retailing that lasts 75 years is a very long life,” says David. “We will have run our course when it’s time to close.”