A 30-foot by 60-foot piece of Toronto history is slowly being removed from the Annex building that it adorned for decades.

Crews began removing the iconic Honest Ed’s sign at the corner of Bloor and Markham streets on Tuesday morning.

The sign, which will be refurbished and placed above the Ed Mirvish Theatre at a later date, is one of 12 individual, signs affixed to the front of the shuttered department store. Together, the signs have 23,000 lightbulbs.

“We want to be very careful when taking it down. It is going to be a long process but it is an important process because it is an important part of Toronto history,” Bob Zincone of Pattison Sign Group told CP24 at the scene. “We started at 9:30 a.m. and we will probably be back tomorrow.”

The current Honest Ed’s sign, which was designed by Ed Mirvish himself, first went up in 1984 and soon became a Toronto landmark.

Zincone said that the sign at Bloor and Markham streets is composed of nine different panels, all of which will be removed individually.

He estimated that the sign weighs a few thousand pounds, making its removal a challenging logistical undertaking.

Mirvish ‘pretty emotional’ to see sign come down

Discussing the process with CP24 on Tuesday, Ed Mirvish’s son David admitted that it is “pretty emotional” to see the sign come down.

“I try not to be sentimental because we have to live in the present. But without this sign, without this store I wouldn’t be able to do the things I do today,” he said

Though the Honest Ed’s sign does not qualify for heritage designation, it nonetheless has a storied past.

Mirvish said that when the sign was first erected those living along Bloor Street were upset and reported that it was keeping them up all night.

He said that the sign also cost a fortune to light up, eventually prompting his father to replace all 23,000 light bulbs with a lower wattage version.

“Hydro couldn’t understand it. They didn’t know what we had done so they accused us of taking power from the grid and not paying for it somehow,” he said. “We had to explain to them that ‘no, we were just tired of your bills.’”

The Honest Ed’s site was sold to Westbank back in 2013 and is slated to be redeveloped into a multi-use site with 850 rental units.

According to Zincone, there are plans for some of the remaining Honest Ed’s sign to be utilized in that development in some form.