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9 minute read

March 19, 2025, 2:37 PM

And by “childhood icon”, I’m talking about the store:

I recently learned that the Hudson’s Bay Company, which operates the store where Today’s Special was filmed, is planning to liquidate its assets and wind-up operations after being unable to secure enough debtor-in-possession financing to continue to operate as a going concern under the Canadian equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Honestly, it’s kind of sad to see a company with as long and storied of a history as Hudson’s Bay meet its demise.  It was incorporated by royal charter in 1670 and granted the right of “sole trade and commerce” over an area known as Rupert’s Land, i.e. they were given a monopoly on trade over the entire Hudson’s Bay drainage basin.  The company initially worked in the fur trade, and over the years, gradually morphed into a retailer, as the company worked to meet the demand for general merchandise items, and established more trading posts to this end.  The company also acquired a number of other companies over the years, including Morgan’s, Shop-Rite, Freimans, Zellers, Simpsons, Towers Department Stores, Woodward’s, and even Kmart Canada as it expanded its footprint across Canada.  By the end of the 20th century, the company operated under three nameplates: The Bay (later rebranding as Hudson’s Bay) for their department stores, Zellers as a discount brand, and Home Outfitters for homelines products.  In the present century, the company saw several ownership changes, having been acquired by Jerry Zucker in 2006, and then by private equity firm NRDC Equity Partners in 2008.  They then went public again in 2012 via an IPO, and then were taken private once again in 2020.

One could opine about what events led the company to its present situation, from their closure of most Zellers stores and the sale of many of those Zellers leases to Target Canada for what would be a very short-lived foray into Canada, as well as a series of private equity owners, but that’s really neither here nor there as far as this discussion goes.  Just know that I feel no love for the various private equity owners who made the decisions that ultimately led us to this juncture, while my heart goes out to all of the Hudson’s Bay employees who are about to lose their jobs through no fault of their own.

My interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company, and more specifically their Toronto flagship store, came via my interest in Today’s Special as well as my more generalized interest in the retail industry.  The store was the Simpsons flagship store until 1991, when it was converted to the Hudson’s Bay nameplate.  It’s quite a fascinating facility, having been built in several stages starting in 1896, and now fills an entire city block, with an office tower, known as the Simpson Tower, on the northwest corner.  The building also has direct connections to the Toronto subway, as well as the Path system of underground tunnels.  I first learned about the history of the building from the Today’s Special episode “Our Story Part 1“, where, while highly simplified for younger audiences, they referenced the store’s real history when describing the situation that they found themselves in, and the plaque that they used in the show was a highly simplified version of a real plaque that is on the exterior of the building that briefly described the history of the Robert Simpson Company.  The plaque also indicates that the building is designated under the Ontario Heritage Act, which, among other things, requires that a property owner apply to the local municipality for approval before altering or demolishing any previously identified heritage elements on the designated property.  In other words, as Jodie said, “Many old buildings that are old enough to have a plaque like this can’t be torn down.  That’s the law.”

Growing up, I figured that the store would always be there.  After all, it had been there since 1896, and it showed no outward signs of slowing down.  When I visited in 1999, it was like a dream come true, seeing the store that I had watched on TV for so long in person.  In 2014, Hudson’s Bay sold the building to commercial real estate investment firm Cadillac Fairview, which formally made the building part of the Toronto Eaton Centre (though the two facilities had been connected via a skywalk for several decades prior to this).  Hudson’s Bay remained in the building, now operating under a leaseback agreement with Cadillac Fairview through 2039.  That was my first inkling that Hudson’s Bay might not be in that building forever.  After all, they were now a tenant, and it would be possible for them to simply walk away from the building after their lease was up after 25 years.  But despite the change in ownership, it was still the store.  It still looked like the store, and it still felt like the store.  That was good, as it felt comforting and reassuring.  Never did I think that the store would depart a full 14 years before its lease was up, but that’s what it looks like will happen.  According to what I’ve read, there’s still a possibility that the store could be saved (where have we heard that before?), if the company is allowed to remove some stores from the liquidation process if it later receives new funding as per its proposed plan.  There is no guarantee that the Toronto flagship location would be one of those locations if it comes to pass, but you never know.

If the store does close, as I suspect that it will, I’ll be interested to see what happens to the space.  As an historic landmark, the building is not going anywhere, so Cadillac Fairview would be responsible for leasing it out to new tenants.  While the exterior will likely remain largely the same, with only signage changes, whether the inside would be at all recognizable from what we have known in the past would be anyone’s guess.  While the historical designation represented by the plaque may prevent the building from being torn down, that doesn’t necessarily preclude future tenants from completely redoing the interior, especially when I don’t know what elements, if any, are protected on the building’s interior.

When I told Elyse that the store was likely going to close, her first reaction was to suggest that we make an “emergency” trip to Toronto to visit the store one last time.  I think that she was surprised that I demurred.  There’s something about maintaining a memory a certain way, as I discovered when rewatching the Care Bears movies as an adult.  It’s like when the ocean liner Mauretania was retired in 1935.  When she left for the scrapyard, and Arthur Rostron, one of her past captains, was there to see her off.  He would not board the ship, stating that he preferred to remember the ship as she was when he commanded her.  That’s my stance on the store.  I don’t want my last memories of the store to be of the place being stripped down to the bare walls with big “ENTIRE STORE ON SALE” and “NOTHING HELD BACK” signs hanging all over the place.  I really don’t want to become witness to “Our Story Part 3”, if you will.  On a future visit to Toronto, I would be fine with visiting the building with new tenants in it and having a brand new experience, or just walking by, seeing it closed, and peeking through the windows.  But I don’t want to see it as it is actively being dismantled.  That would be a very sad trip, and learning about the store’s demise from afar is hard enough.  As it is, it was hard to watch parts of “Our Story Part 1” to research this entry, because I knew that the same thing that was happening in that episode was about to happen in real life.  The fictional closure and subsequent saving of the store was one thing, but real life doesn’t always have a happy ending, and this wouldn’t be that.

I’m also comforted by the idea that Today’s Special is more than just the store.  Sure, most of the scenes that they filmed on location were shot there, but the show also went into the community and visited so many other places.  When Elyse and I went to Toronto in 2019, we visited the store on the first day, but then after that, we went out all over the city, as we explored Toronto and visited many other places where filming occurred that were perhaps even more fascinating than the store, and met so many wonderful people.  It was truly an awesome time.

There’s also a certain level of magic to the store that I will miss after it is gone.  Going in there always felt magical.  And it was 100% because of the association with Today’s Special.  I imagine that with a different tenant in the building, that magic will be lost.  Even despite the passage of more than three decades since the show ended, it still feels familiar.  When Elyse and I visited in 2023, after all, the first thing that I did was to head to the escalator, saying, “Well, everything’s all safe down here.  Let’s go upstairs!”  Elyse also filmed me singing a song while going down the escalators.  And when we needed assistance from an employee about what the products were, I said to Elyse, “Let me go find Jodie.”  Likewise, when we visited in 2019, my mind was short circuiting when the store employees were giving away free booze during a “Guys’ Night Out” event on the fifth floor, and Elyse was partaking.  After all, in “Phil’s Visit“, Sam told Phil that the store doesn’t allow alcohol, and then here’s Elyse right next to me getting loaded at the store with alcohol that the store provided.

In processing this upcoming loss, I was also reminded of something else: the store that I love is a fictional construct, and the Hudson’s Bay store (Simpsons back then) was simply a conduit to help portray the fictional store.  It’s easy to conflate the fictional store with the real-life store, but even if the real-life store goes away, the store from Today’s Special can remain a viable going concern for as long as I want it to be.  I’ve come up with my own ideas about what happened in the lives of the characters after we stopped periodically checking in on them, and perhaps I’ll share those ideas one day.  I imagine that others have their own ideas about what Jeff, Jodie, Sam, Muffy, Mrs. Pennypacker, TXL, and everyone else have been up to over the past three decades.  It may not have been written out by Joanne Hauser, Clive Endersby, Candice Bist, or any of the other writers, but it’s only natural to want to pick up where they left off and imagine what these characters did down the road, and determine how much success they had in their lives as the minutes turned to hours, and the years went rolling by.

I also didn’t think that this pending closure would affect me as much as it has.  Even acknowledging all that I’ve said above about fiction vs. reality, it still feels like a part of me is closing down right along with the store.  I’m feeling a sense of loss.  It’s a similar feeling to the sense of loss that I felt when Nerene Virgin passed away last year.  I know that for a while after her death, it was hard to sing certain Jodie songs without getting a little choked up.  I can sing them just fine now, though.  With the pending closure of the store, I’ve found myself mentally going over the events of “Our Story” while operating the train, and feeling a bit sad about it.  Especially so when thinking about the ending of the episode, knowing that this probably won’t have a happy ending like the episode did.  I imagine that this, too, will become easier with time.  I also recognize that it may seem silly to some for me to be this worked up about a retail business.  After all, I feel as though I am genuinely grieving the loss of a department store, and even I recognize that it’s just a little bit strange.  Maybe it’s an autism thing.  But, as the saying goes, this hits right in the childhood, so forgive me.

Clearly, the store has meant a lot to me over the years.  To that end, I created a short video tribute to the store, featuring a slideshow of various photos that I had taken of the store on my past visits, set to the song shown as Jeff’s dream from the Today’s Special episode “Sleep“:

And no, that’s not Jeff singing in that clip.  That’s me.  I felt like Jeff in many ways whenever I visited the store, having a magical world in which to explore.  Therefore, it felt fitting for the lyrics to be in my voice, even if I don’t sound as refined or as polished as Jeff did back in 1981, in order to emphasize that personal connection.  Plus it doesn’t hurt that I did actually sing this song in the store once.

One way or another, the world will go on without the store, but I feel like I’m in the position that Jodie was in during “Our Story”.  There, she was sorting through her own feelings of sadness on the inside, but doing her best to hold it together for Jeff, Muffy, and Sam.  I feel the same way about this, in that it’s business as usual for me, but the store has definitely been weighing heavily on my mind these last few days, even if there’s nothing that I can do about the situation.  It reminds me of a few lines from a song of Jodie’s, where she said, “Wish them luck as they go on their way, and be brave, try to calm all their fears.  I’ll smile, though my heart feels like breaking.  Don’t cry.  This is no time for tears.”

Categories: Canada, Today's Special