Honest Ed’s bargain store has been on the southwest corner of Bloor & Bathurst Streets for as long as most people in Toronto can remember, and it shares my birthdate, 1948.

The site was sold by the Mirvish family a few years ago and will be redeveloped with a mix of commercial and residential buildings. The store closed on December 31, 2016.

As a marketing phenomenon, Honest Ed’s had a style all its own that was not the staid sort of thing one would see downtown at Eaton’s, and definitely not a few kilometres to the east near Bay and Bloor in what has come to be called the “Mink Mile”.

In honour of the long-standing role of the store near Bathurst Station, the TTC changed much of the signage to match the Honest Ed’s style, using Ed’s own sign painters to design the very un-TTC like update to an otherwise grey station from the mid-1960s era of the original Bloor-Danforth subway line.

For the benefit of those who didn’t get to the station, and for out of town readers, here is a gallery of Bathurst Station as it appeared on January 1, 2017.

And a Happy New Year to everyone!

[Note: There appears to be some problem between WordPress and Firefox in that the gallery below will not open properly if you are reading this article from the main URL. However, if you click on the article title so that this is the only article displayed, the gallery will work properly. This problem has been reported to WordPress.]