On Thursday morning, it finally happened. Toronto, as has become our tradition, threw a traffic jam to celebrate.

The cars lined up on Yonge St. and on Queens Quay, honking and inching around, and a few hundred pedestrians crowded around the shoreline of Toronto Harbour to see the final voyage of Captain John’s floating restaurant ship.

“Holy cow, they’re finally getting rid of it,” one man said, gazing at the landmark red and white vessel that has been docked at the foot of Toronto’s main drag, functioning as a restaurant and banquet hall, for decades.

“If they can’t manage a boat, how are they going to handle the Pan-Am games?” a woman sneered, gesturing to the traffic.

In the end they hoisted camera phones to capture the moment when tugboats pulled the 90-metre, 1,800-tonne ocean liner Jadran away. A clarinet and a horn on the sidewalk played “Goodnight Irene” as the neon marquee on the bow spelling out the word “SEAFOOD” receded from the dock shortly after 10:30 a.m., and “Captain” John Letnik appeared at the rail to take off his sailor’s cap and wave goodbye.

The ship turned starboard quickly and without incident, and another piece of what Toronto has been was on its way to the scrapyard.

It will be missed by many, but in a strange way: like the oddball alcoholic uncle in the family, one with loud shirts and a louder voice constantly telling inappropriate jokes, the one whom no one much liked but whose awkward presence was a defining feature of Thanksgiving dinners, and whose absence leaves everything seeming more dignified but less interesting.

Captain John’s was by most reports a terrible restaurant, the kind of place where word of mouth in recent decades held that if you went, you should avoid the seafood, and avoid the food in general if possible. It was musty inside and had grown rusty outside, and it was tacky in its design from the outset. Legions of Torontonians considered it an eyesore.

But you know, it had character, as did owner Letnik, who served as self-appointed captain and chef, and who lived on the boat at least some of the time over the years. Toronto once had a bunch of minor-celebrity eccentrics running its landmark businesses — Mel Lastman, Ed Mirvish, Sam Sniderman (and before them Timothy Eaton, inventor of the money-back guarantee) — and often their shops, like Letnik’s, were pure expressions of their eccentricity.

Slowly, surely, they’re disappearing: Sam the Record Man, World’s Biggest Bookstore, now Captain John’s and soon Honest Ed’s; Jilly’s strip club on Queen East and the Matador after-hours hall on Dovercourt, the little shops in Roy’s Square at Yonge and Bloor, even the nightclubs in the Entertainment District and so many small, unlamented little joints, diners and dives and family-run hardware stores and book shops and curiosity emporia across the city.

Change is the nature of cities, of course — it’s good! — but it’s fair to note the relentless monotony of what replaces the landmarks of yesteryear: green glass towers, Winners, Home Depot, Forever 21, Chipotle, Starbucks. As with most cities in the world, the distinct local features of this place are replaced by the samey-same-sameness of everyplace, the franchises of global culture, outposts of a global esthetic. These places are often prettier than the ones they replace, or at least less gaudy and more dignified. They are often more efficient at delivering goods and services, at better prices, with more consistent products. But they’re boring.

There’s a slogan, as I’ve noted before, on the wall of Honest Ed’s that says, “There’s no place like this place anyplace.” That’s something you could have said about Captain John’s and others, that if you were standing in front of them you knew exactly where in the world you were. It’s something you can say about fewer and fewer places in Toronto each year. And one fewer still this week.

“It’s going to look so weird down here now without it,” said one woman to her friend, gesturing to the harbour. “The ship was like the CN Tower, just always there.” The brass duo was playing “Amazing Grace” now as the big ship moved to the east more quickly than had seemed likely, and escaped from view.

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A man was holding his toddler son, embracing him, gazing into the water where for both of their entire lives the ship had been anchored. “It’s sad, bud,” he said to the boy. “Everything changes eventually.”

He’s right about that. But the really sad part of it is that the more things change, the more they become the same.

Correction – May 29, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the weight of the ship in pounds and mistakenly said the Jadran is a 900-metre vessel. As well, the earlier version misspelled John Letnik’s surname.