A coat of arms plaque from the Bay is being auctioned off, and it’s currently sitting at $7,500
But there are still some auction treasures hovering in the hundreds
If you weren’t among the very lucky, very rich bidders who spent a collective $5.9 million at the Hudson’s Bay art auction last November, you may still have a chance to take home a piece of Canadian department store history.
Toronto’s Heffel Fine Art Auction House, which oversaw the high-profile sell-off following the Bay’s closure last year, has resumed its online auction of Bay goods.
Related: The Battle for the Bay—how the country’s oldest corporation came to its bitter end
A Canadian red ensign flag made in 1920 is currently sitting at $2,500, and a vintage Bay order box from the 1950s is sitting at $1,600. There are still a handful of treasures hovering in the hundreds, including a wedding dress designed in 1928, going for $100 as we write this, and a set of leather-bound buyers’ notebooks containing handwritten notes and fabric samples from the 1910s, going for $125.
The biggest-ticket item this round is an HBC coat of arms plaque. The auction’s site says it’s made of metal and weighs 105 pounds, but little other information is provided. Could it be the same plaque an eagle-eyed Reddit user spotted during removal from the former Bay store downtown?
Many in the Reddit thread thought it should be donated to a museum. Wherever it’s destined to end up, the auction price is currently $7,500, and bids close on Thursday.
Related: Yorkdale’s owners got their way, and a Fairweather-owned department store will not be moving in
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
