



Tomorrow December 31st 2016 the Toronto famous store Honest Ed’s will close forever. If you live in the city and never visited the place you missed your lifetime pilgrimage duty to the notorious department store. Business man Ed Mirvish opened the store in 1948 as a discount retail for the booming population that fueled the post-war period in Canada, helping many families with their basic needs at affordable prices from food to beverages, from clothing to wild wooden artifacts that belong to movie sets.

Most likely I will receive criticism for writing this post but it’s not about Honest Ed itself that my words are going to, but the way the city and Torontonians perceived this business attraction and upheld it like a major tourist spot because of the lack of true landmarks Toronto has.

I shopped at Honest Ed’s multiple times in the past and so did my family when they moved to Canada decades ago. I believe it never changed as the interiors are a glorification of actors that are immortalized throughout the store in black and white photos, where a series of posters promoted Ed Mirvish productions and theater shows.

There was pretty much everything at Honest Ed’s money can buy for the household usage and also a small accountant office and a hair dresser. It truly felt somehow that you entered a movie set or the background the theater works. Chipped wooden panels and the moldy smell were too common across the store to continue existing in a city that discovered itself dormant and falling out of fashion in the last twenty year, but now was eager to make up for the lost times.

From the outside Honest Ed’s looked like a Las Vegas casino from the good old days of the Rat Pack on a live stage and on the silver screen. It was meant to be glamorous and to attract people for business purposes but also to give itself an image to brand its practices of reaching to the public in different ways.

Time flies and Toronto’s construction companies delivered a different skyline from the one it kept for too long in the past, and it came later because the city developed everywhere (especially north) with the suburban sprawl of the 80s and 90s. Since the beginning of the 21st century new condos and office towers sprung up like mushrooms after the rain.

According to Google, Honest Ed IS a landmark…





The lack of a true public realm in Toronto has deprived its citizens to live the streets experiencing the open urban landscape, rather than dwell home in front of a screen or on the DVP at 5pm. People have no true landmarks to reference as public places to freely gather without engaging in a commercial transaction.

Someone will say “But we have parks, the sidewalks, shopping places, and…” and nothing else pretty much. Parks and sidewalks are the basic elements of any civilized society that puts effort in maintaining their cities; shopping places open to the public but are privately owned, just like Honest Ed.

Calling Mirvish’s store a city landmark it’s like calling a McDonald’s restaurant a place worthy of a Michelin star. The low expectation of Toronto’s urban landscape has pushed the whole town and the media in glorifying a discount retail to city attraction. This reinforces the argument that Toronto needs more tourist attractions because primarily what drives people here is the commercial flux of capital and the ability to see a “modern” place for tourists that come from Europe.

Yes, there’s the CN Tower and the former Skydome which in my opinion are still holding up the test of time as unique engineering marvels; Casaloma at the the edge of downtown is a nice structure that brings a bit of the old European flavor. However, what remains considered as a landmark is the eyesore of postmodernism architecture and wasted tax money.

ED-209 still waiting for Robocop to show up…





Nathan Philips square is a squander of space that recently received a band-aid solution with the lit ‘Toronto’ sign reminding you it’s not some science fiction utopia where not even Robocop would find interesting to patrol. Rich in cement and void of green, City Hall and the surrounding structures weren’t thought with people in mind, but since there’s nothing else going on except for the seasonal ice skating, pedestrians will try avoiding it the remaining days of the year as there’s nothing appealing and worthy to care about, just like Boston city hall.

Other buildings across the city are the spawn of this architecture phenomena called brutalist movement, which dominated modern history from the 50s until the 80s. Thirty years of concrete pouring that scarred urban design creating disfigured structures which contributed to render cities and people sad, looking more like mechanical spaces for cars and trucks than habitats for human beings.

The other urban failure of Toronto is Dundas Square after the former mayor Mel Lastman insisted on imitating Manhattan’s Time Square in an attempt to become the Big Apple of the north. But Toronto isn’t New York and if there’s anything the city should copy that is the public realm Europe has been carefully maintaining for centuries despite the many disasters and changes happening in the 20th century.

Barcelona, just like other European cities, has plenty of pedestrian spaces for people to enjoy and allow business to thrive.





Toronto isn’t a city for pedestrians and it will never be even if we pretend that by temporarily closing streets to summer festivals we are engaging the public to retake their spaces; it will take more than gyros and churros to convince people they could have pedestrian areas. This famous letter written two years ago by Danish tourists was a slap at Canada’s car-culture and all those allowing it to continue. As long as roads will be drawn forming the grid system that creates traffic congestion and disincentive people from feeling safe walking downtown, there won’t be a future for landmarks to define cities with unique characteristics, nor the urban landscape can continue to have a healthy fate.

All in all, yes, the City Of Toronto should apologize for the lack of foresight and grievous mistakes it has done against the people and the tourists by leaving everything outdated and unplanned, where lack of urban continuity and absence of major points of interest cannot define the city’s core as a place of gathering and reference. Toronto is no little dwelling, it’s the 4th largest city in North America and it should act accordingly.