It was interesting, the rush of nostalgia for Honest Ed’s as it finally closed its doors for good. Instagram feeds glowed with arty angles of its Vegas-style neon sign. The Centre for Social Innovation joined local artists, craft breweries and the Design Exchange to rock the funky shell of the old store for a Farewell weekend of installations and parties.

Weeks beforehand, people who hadn’t been there in years were lined up to buy anything — a bent and scuffed scrap of paper advertising Jergen’s Lotion for $3.99 — so long as it qualified as Honest Edwardiana (some examples of which, of course, are already up for resale on eBay and Kijiji).

Not only do I have several friends who developed a sort of addiction to Ed’s signage and kept going back for more, I, too, found myself visiting the old discounter on more than one occasion to pick over the scraps. And while there was something sort of sad about all the hipsters — the same types who will end up living in the condo that will replace the store on the site — picking over its carcass, I decided not to feel badly about it because I really did love and frequent the store.

In its best years, back when Ed himself was alive and kicking, you were guaranteed to find something truly great amidst the dreck — a quality, Italian-made aluminum frying pan; obscure reggae recordings on vinyl; real Hungarian paprika or simple, all-cotton baby onesies are among the treasures I recall bringing home over the years. True reflections, in retrospect, of our city’s increasingly multicultural tastes — and at prices so low … I need Ed’s sign painters to fill in the blanks.

Because that was the goofy magic of the store. It was one of a kind, just like its founder. It wasn’t franchised or online: you had to be there. And from the hilariously underwater-sounding warble of the in-store announcements to the schmaltzy, Catskills humour of the red, yellow and blue hand-painted script of the store’s signs, it was all Ed, all the time.

I once had the honour of doing a photo shoot with the late Ed Mirvish many years ago for Toronto Life and it was hilarious because no matter how many times the photographer and I tried to talk him into a casual, relaxed position, in the millisecond that the camera’s flash would go off, he would turn on that same exact showbiz pose: eyes lit up, arms wide, huge carnival barker’s smile. It was like he just couldn’t help himself.

Despite estimates in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to move a portion of the old neon sign down to the Ed Mirvish theatre, Ed’s son David Mirvish can’t seem to help himself either. “Ultimately, I guess I’m sentimental —more than I realized,” Mirvish told this paper.

What we’re all going to miss along with Honest Ed’s was its originality. Toronto now may be way more fun to live in than it used to be back in Ed’s heyday, but there is something true and, yes, honest, in those signs that remind us of what we’ve lost along the way.