"We still have a lot of vacancies," Brian Burchell, chair of the Mirvish Village Business Improvement Area, said this summer. "We hope they continue to be filled with eclectic, imaginative destinations."
That admission sums up where things stand at Bloor and Bathurst nearly a decade after Honest Ed's closed its doors for the last time on December 31, 2016. The fencing came down in stages this year. Some of it is finally worth walking through. Some of it is still waiting on tenants who haven't signed a lease.
Here's what separates the two, and why the smallest storefronts in the whole development are the ones actually keeping pace with the calendar.
What You Can Walk Into Right Now
Pizzeria Badiali opened its second Toronto location on May 11 at 581 Markham Street, inside the restored Victory House, a 5,552-square-foot Victorian that used to hold Victory Cafe. Head chef and co-owner Ryan Baddeley picked the block for a reason that has nothing to do with foot traffic projections. "There was a knife shop here that I used to come to all the time," he said, recalling the old Markham Street before the fences went up.
A few doors down, Book Bar combines a bookstore with a cocktail bar, a small nod to the neighbourhood's history as the home of David Mirvish Books before the redevelopment. Both businesses moved into restored heritage houses rather than the new towers, which matters more than it sounds. Markham Street's ten conserved buildings were never meant to hold large-format tenants. They were built as houses in the 1880s and 1890s, and the retrofits kept the room sizes that come with that.
Elsewhere on site, the practical stuff arrived first and without much fanfare: a Bank of Montreal branch, an LCBO, and a Pet Planet, all inside the base of the new residential towers along Bathurst and Bloor. Niagara College has also set up a campus in the development, adding daytime foot traffic that has nothing to do with retail leasing at all.
The Anchor That Didn't Show Up
Here's the number that tells you where the real friction sits. As of mid-August, only 48 of the development's 106 total commercial units were leased, according to CBC's reporting on the project. That's less than half, in a development that's supposed to be substantially finished by fall.
The clearest example of why: Bestco Fresh Foods, an Asian grocer, was slated to move in as one of the project's anchor tenants. The lease was terminated after the company allegedly missed rental payments, and Peterson, the Vancouver-based developer, has said another grocery store will be announced to take its place. No name yet. No date yet.
Large-format retail is a harder sell right now across the city, not just at this address. A University of Toronto urban planning professor pointed to the underlying math: big-box spaces come with big-box lease rates, and those rates have climbed to a point where filling a large footprint is its own separate negotiation from filling a small one. There's also a sequencing problem that a Toronto Metropolitan University planning professor flagged: retailers who need guaranteed foot traffic tend to wait until a development's residential towers are more fully occupied before committing, which means the biggest spaces are often the last to fill, not the first.
Why the Small Shops Beat Them There
Honest Ed's Alley is the part of Mirvish Village built specifically to sidestep that problem. It's a narrow pedestrian laneway running between Markham and Bathurst, just off Lennox Street, lined with roughly 25 micro-retail units ranging from about 150 to 400 square feet. The design borrows its neon-and-lantern look from Tokyo's alleyways on purpose, a wink at the bargain-bin energy Honest Ed's built its name on for almost 70 years.
The leasing terms are the actual innovation, not the aesthetic. "Corporate covenant, which is typically a requirement in other retail environments, is not needed here," according to the project's retail lead. No major deposit. No long-term commitment. That's the exact opposite of what a grocery chain or a bank needs before it will sign, which is precisely why a smoothie stand can open before a supermarket can.
Confirmed tenants already signed for the Alley include Unruly Smoothie, serving plant-based drinks, and Batch Cookies, known for chunky chocolate chip. An earlier report suggested the vacancy problem was delaying the Alley's opening. It wasn't. According to Toronto Life's correction of that story, "the market will open in September," meaning the space built to need the least is the one keeping the original schedule while the spaces built to need the most are still negotiating.
What's Finishing This Fall
Cremma Gelato is set to open at 597 Markham Street in early fall, from Michael Marshall and chef Graziano Totora, the pair behind Carolina, the Italian restaurant they opened on Dundas West in 2024. The gelato shop takes its serving style from the Amalfi Coast rather than a standard cone or cup, including gelato served in a warm brioche bun. Blackbird Baking Co. has also signed on for a Markham Street location and is finishing its build-out.
Peterson has told both CBC and Toronto Life that construction on the overall project should be substantially complete this fall, nearly four years past the original 2022 target. The delay traces to the pandemic and to a corporate shuffle in which EllisDon exited as construction partner and Peterson bought out Westbank's remaining stake in the development earlier this year.
The Park That Didn't Wait on Any of It
Honest Ed's Park opened in July, on the west side of Markham Street, with Mayor Olivia Chow and David Mirvish, Ed's son, both in attendance. Designed by PFS Studio, the 1,213-square-metre green space translates the old store's personality into gardens and an interactive water feature shaped like a bird bath, a reference to one of Ed Mirvish's favourite lines, "for the birds, cheep cheep cheep."
Peterson also reinstated the original light-up Honest Ed's sign nearby, a piece of signage that had sat in storage since the store closed. Between the sign and the park, this is the one corner of the site that opened on time, didn't need a tenant to sign a lease, and doesn't care whether the grocery store situation ever gets sorted out.
The Walk As It Stands Today
Right now, on a Saturday, you can get a slice at Badiali, a cocktail or a used paperback at Book Bar, and a smoothie or a cookie in the Alley once its first vendors are running. You can sit in the park under the new plantings. What you still can't do is buy groceries on site, or count on every storefront on Markham Street being occupied by the time the leaves turn.
That gap between the human-scale spaces and the anchor spaces isn't a flaw in the project. It's the clearest evidence yet of which parts of a ten-year redevelopment move fast and which parts don't, and it's worth knowing before you plan your next walk down Markham Street expecting the whole block to be finished.
Catherine Mortimer keeps a close eye on what's actually opening in the Annex, not just what's been announced. If you want to know when the next storefront signs a lease, or when that grocery replacement finally gets a name, get in touch.
