Mirvish Village is vacant and Honest Ed's had its big goodbye party this past weekend. The end is nigh for the southwest corner of Bloor and Bathurst as the wrecking ball slowly swoops in.

While the intersection was lively this weekend, it's going to be pretty quiet for the next little while. That's why I spoke to some of those nearby to see what they think about living and working near a ghost town.

“I think it does feel a bit empty in this moment, but I don’t think it’s really hit a lot of us until we start to see the kind of demolition of buildings,” says Adil Dhalla, one of the organizers behind last weekend's festivities. We spoke as he was setting up the space.

Dhalla is also the executive direct of the Centre for Social Innovation, which is headquartered just south of Honest Ed's.

The CSI also has a location in Regent Park, so Dhalla knows it can be complicated to watch as a neighbourhood changes.

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Toronto’s newest Fabricland—and at 16,000 square feet, also its largest—is located in the basement of Honest Ed’s, at the corner of Bloor Street West and Bathurst Street. Go past the kitchen supplies and the jumble of tiny gold Buddhas, and head downstairs to where the Polish cookies used to be. Now, there are rows of buttons, neon thread, and pink urethane cushions available for sale. If you’ve been inside any other Fabricland, you know what to expect: the lighting is fluorescent, the music is canned, and the fabric is plentiful.

There are fabrics for clothings, for home decor, for handicrafts, for finishing touches. There are gossamer tulles and heavy brocades. There are fun furs and feather boas, a million different buttons, and the same depressed-looking knitting section that every Fabricland store offers. There are some surprises, like a quilting cotton printed with a map of the Canadian rail corridors and sleek examples of public transit (which gives the impression that Calgary might have a bullet train!), and a huge roll of zebra-print fleece. The salespeople are friendly. The clientele is mostly women, mostly middle-aged. There are no windows.

There’s a certain brio inherent in opening a store with a limited lifespan: this Fabricland will close at the end of next year, when Honest Ed’s vacates the corner block it has dominated for 67 years, and a new condo development moves in. We’re used to thinking of pop-up stores as being in service of the new and the hip, but this particular short-term tenant is trend-proof. The pattern books suggest items like blousy jackets that would look at home on the set of The Cosby Show, and wide-legged pants particular to the late-1990s raver style. Leafing through one of those books is like hopping into a time machine you have to assemble yourself. There are a few designer gems, like Rachel Comey and Donna Karan, but those require some serious digging to find.

If it sounds like I’m being hard on Fabricland, I’m not. Growing up with an interior-designer mother, I spent more than my fair share of time wandering among the bolts of Stratford, Ontario’s Fabricland. (Fabric stores often rival hardware stores for places that are utterly uninteresting to children.) Fabric is the raw material of creativity: a seasoned eye can look at a bolt of fabric and see a couch, a new pair of pants, or a quilt. But these stores offer no toys and no books, and there are only so many patterned flannelettes one can fondle before even the most well-behaved child will slide onto the floor and throw a temper tantrum just for something to do.

The Metro persists not because of a loyal following of devoted connoisseurs or an eccentric philanthropist with a soft spot for vintage erotica, but because Hirji has priced the property out of the market in an attempt to recover his considerable losses.

The 5,450 square-foot space — with two classic 300-seat theatres — is listed for sale at $3.59 million, or $658 per square foot, which even the property’s broker admits is overpriced by almost half.

“The asking price is on the high side,” says Joseph Kang, of Keller Williams Real Estate Service. “$2 million would be a reasonable price.”

Steps away from Christie subway station at 677 Bloor St. W., The Metro will be “a prime development site,” says Steven Alikakos, senior vice-president of DTZ Barnicke, a commercial real estate brokerage. “[But] the costs of turning the space into something usable are just too much to make it work at $3.5 million.”

Building a residential development would require buying the adjacent corner grocery, Alikakos said, and even then the developer would only be able to build eight storeys. “You can’t make money on eight storeys at the price he’s trying to sell it.”

Ryerson University professor Paul Moore, who has studied the history of movie theatres, thinks the idea might work. The Metro, he notes, was never a mainstream theatre but was instead independent at its opening in 1939, showing a "scandalous" B-movie called, Delinquent Parents: The Unforgettable Drama of Modern Youth and Selfish Parents.

Though he says it won't be a theatre that will appeal to families or children, it will fulfil a niche in Toronto by having foreign films downtown.

"It's going to be for hipster, university students and esthetes that are interested in global cinema and adults and downtown cosmopolitan types that are interested in cinema," he said. "And I don't think that a downtown hipster kind of person is going to be that worried about this being a pornographic cinema in the afternoon."

The market for pornography in movie theatres was gutted when the VCR came along in the early 1980s. Adult theatres have also suffered for the same reasons independent cinemas have — competition from the Hollywood blockbuster, the mega-plex, and the internet.

"The ones that are left are serving an art house clientele or a very niche neighbourhood community-centre kind of model," he said.