The Hudson’s Bay plaques are coming down
Should they be preserved in a museum?
A passerby in Toronto recently spotted a Hudson’s Bay plaque being removed from the exterior wall outside the store’s former location on Richmond Street. The Bay has been closed since last year, after the company filed for creditor protection and ceased operations entirely, but it stung to see the recognizable plaque come down, one of the last symbolic motions of the Bay’s era ending.
Related: The Battle for the Bay—how the country’s oldest corporation came to its bitter end
On Reddit, where the passerby posted a photo of workers using power tools to remove the plaque, many said it should be kept in a museum—the Bay’s royal charter, signed in 1670, has been donated for shared preservation to the Archives of Manitoba, the Manitoba Museum, the Canadian Museum of History and the Royal Ontario Museum, so it’d make sense to keep this piece of history safe there.
Others jokingly suggested storing it with the Sam the Record Man sign near Sankofa Square, and keeping the Honest Ed’s sign there, too, creating a whole gallery of relic signage where we can gather and weep. (Not a bad idea.)
On another Reddit thread yesterday, a user posted a photo of what they said they found underneath a removed Bay plaque: the remnants of a former Simpsons department sign. Toronto is one big Matryoshka doll of cool, sad memories.
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.
