Towards the very end of Honest Ed’s long goodbye — more than three years after the store closing was announced, and about two weeks before its final checkout — we took the kids on a pilgrimage, introducing them to the longtime Toronto institution just so they could bid it farewell.

“The best part of it was the signs,” my 5-year old daughter said when it was all done and we had exited into Mirvish Village to shop for comic books. And if she wasn’t 100 per cent right, by the end, she wasn’t far off.

The signs, starting with the instantly recognizable 1,000-points-of-light marquee spelling out the name across the width of an entire blinking city block, defining the vista of the Annex for generations. And in around those light bulbs, those eccentrically punctuated, terrible puns: “Honest Ed’s a monkey! ‘You can buy his bargains for peanuts!!’” And down beneath: “Don’t just stand there, ‘buy something’!!”

By the end, if we’re being candid, if you were actually looking to buy something, there were better places to do it, and plenty of them. Once upon a time, in a city whose retail landscape was dominated by staid WASPy surnames like Simpson and Eaton, Ed Mirvish virtually invented the discount retail store in this place, and it was a lifeline to generations of students and immigrants and people in plain old hard times. This is a story we know well by now — through roughly 41 months of retrospectives anticipating the store’s closing, we’ve all had time to reflect on the generous turkey giveaways, the long lineups for the door crasher giveaway sales, the business that boomed from one tiny storefront to take over the block and anchor a theatre and restaurant empire.

By now, Dollarama is cheaper, Wal-Mart typically offers better quality merchandise and more consistent selection, and both of those conglomerates have many locations much closer to where today’s immigrant and impoverished populations typically live. It’s hard to imagine anyone is going to miss Honest Ed’s because they cannot get what they used to buy there somewhere else, for as good a price.

But my goodness, those places are not Honest Ed’s. They have the stuff, mostly better stuff, and they have the prices, but they don’t have the signs: “Come in and get lost” they said over the door, and if you did, you would.

We wandered around inside with the kids for about an hour, up and down dusty stairwells, through rooms and into other rooms, across the bridge over the alley, poking our heads into rooms closed now that stock had been liquidated and consolidated. Ladies wear, sporting goods, housewares, antique oddities, groceries — hey, a dentist, an optometrist, a pharmacy … why not? It was a maze of a store like nothing you find in a mall, improvised through successive renovations and additions to create a feeling more carnival funhouse than merchandising science, with jokes and old theatre posters scattered wherever they would fit.

Eventually we came again to the signs — the interior ones this time, for sale as souvenirs. “Christmas Tea Towels $1.19 ea.,” “Men’s / Ladies / Teens Velcro Closure Fashion Shoes $4.99,” “Ladies or Misses Fancy Panties 99¢” and so on. Each of them hand painted by an employee of the store in red, blue and yellow — as all the interior signage was, right up to the very end. Each a unique piece of individual labour. You don’t find that at Wal-Mart. You don’t find that anywhere.

This, this is what many of us will feel is lost when the doors finally close for the last time on Dec. 31. A place, a landmark, that was one-of-a-kind and custom made, from its blockbusting construction right on down to its price tags. You can buy the same stuff anywhere. Yet this store that sold it here was an eccentric reflection of its founder’s personality and humour, it’s own gradual evolution, the care and effort of its staff. Maybe I’ve noted this before — of Ed’s, of the now scrapped Captain John’s Seafood ship, of Sam The Record Man — but it seems an inescapable feeling for some of us as we watch the city change and grow, often in good, healthy ways: Something is shifting, something essential about what Toronto was is being replaced by something else, what Toronto will be.

Ed’s is an especially large and glaring example of a city that was cheap and sort of tacky and mostly tacked together haphazardly, but was unembarrassed by it, and was practical and audacious in its grand ambitions at the same time. And Ed’s was an especially on-the-nose holdover from a Toronto full of places that offered an experience unique in the world.

We don’t necessarily just miss these places we haven’t patronized for years for what they were, but for what they weren’t: generic outposts of the great global blah that makes eating or shopping or strolling a homogenous experience in major cities spanning the continent and much of the world.

The residential apartment and retail store complex slated to replace Honest Ed’s promises to be something different from the glass-wall condo template that dominates much of the city now. We’ll see. It’s hard to believe it will be as different from anything else as what it is replacing.

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“There’s no place like this place, anyplace!” the sign on the corner of the building says, and for 68 years it wasn’t quite true, because there was this one place, right here. And now there won’t be.

We bought one of those hand-painted signs as a souvenir, “Ladies and Misses Fashion Dresses $35.” The signs weren’t exactly the very best part, but it’s a fitting symbol of something worth remembering: it’s bright and direct and there is not another one quite like it in the world.