An Incremental Urbanism: Zoning Infractions at Toronto’s Honest Ed’s and Mirvish Village, 1943-1963

In the 1940s, Ed and Anne Mirvish opened an unruly discount retail store – Honest Ed’s – which spurred the creation of an artists’ colony on a residential street, later known as Mirvish Village. The store welcomed the city’s low-income and immigrant populations, becoming an iconic bazaar-like establishment until closing in 2014. Mirvish Village – which closed then, too – was celebrated in the 1960s by Jane Jacobs (who lived around the corner) as a bottom-up transformation that created a valued public realm. Through the influence of Anne (a sculptor), the street became host to galleries and studios and was an important center for Canadian art, thanks in no small part to the David Mirvish Gallery, opened by Ed and Anne’s son in 1963. Honest Ed’s and Mirvish Village developed organically over a 70-year period in Toronto’s post-war history and are the product of a series of responses to existing conditions, zoning infractions, and incremental alterations generated by users adapting the city to suit their needs. The resulting urban condition, spanning an entire city block, led Robert Fulford, the Canadian journalist, to call Ed “the most imaginative town planner of his generation.” This paper examines these entrepreneurial and artist-driven changes to land use within Toronto’s emergent planning framework. It argues how a lack of strict zoning regulation (slowly replacing restrictions enforced through the Building Code) allowed people to make changes to their environment in ways that are no longer possible, but which created conditions the city now seeks to conserve.