For more than 50 years, the glow of the Toronto Star’s signage served as a bright blue beacon along the city’s lakeside skyline. Photo © Scott Heaney | Dreamstime.com
By Carly McHugh
For more than 50 years, the glow of the Toronto Star’s signage served as a bright blue beacon along the city’s lakeside skyline. Signifying the presence of the newspaper’s head office, it became a well-known landmark in Ontario’s capital city.
The signage underwent a retrofit in 2014, to both prolong its life and make it easier to maintain for years to come. After LED Solutions of Hamilton completed the project, the signs sat virtually undisturbed for nearly a decade longer.
However, at the end of 2022, the Toronto Star’s story at 1 Yonge St. came to its conclusion. The building had been purchased and the newspaper was required to move out, calling for the removal of its iconic signage. Once again, LED Solutions returned to the site, this time to take down two sets of the big, blue channel letters.
While the signage itself may be gone from the building, its mark on the city of Toronto still remains. In its half-century of existence, it has experienced a new lease on life, the end of its residence on bustling Yonge Street, and now, the hope for its new home within the cityscape.
A brighter future
In 2014, the concept of LED retrofits had begun to break out in the sign industry. After receiving positive feedback on these types of projects, as well as how they contributed to energy savings and maintenance, LED Solutions sought to expand their portfolio with a variety of large-scale retrofits.
Therefore, when the opportunity came to work with the Toronto Star, on what would be the shop’s largest retrofit project yet, they were eager to take on the repair of the four large building signs. After years of lakeside wind and weather conditions, the steel letters—ranging in height from 1.5 to 2.4 m (5 to 8 ft)—were battered and rusty and had large holes in them. The faces were broken, the vinyl was faded, and the trim caps were cracked. The five-stroke neon inside the letters was also exposed, and there was a dozen failed transformers amongst all elevations. At the time, the newspaper was spending tens of thousands of dollars on repairs each year, to keep the signs presentable.
Indeed, the project was complex, and already had multiple bidders. However, what secured it for LED Solutions was their ability to complete the retrofit without having to take the signs down, along with a glowing review from one of their long-time clients, entertainment company Cineplex.
Once they exchanged all necessary paperwork, LED Solutions worked with a swing stage company as well as a scaffolding company to co-ordinate the necessary equipment for the job. This particular project required 51.8 m (170 ft) of engineered scaffolding, to create a pedestrian walkway for the building while the work was being conducted overhead. Throughout the process, two technicians worked from the swing stage, while another was positioned on the rooftop, and a fourth stayed on the ground to direct pedestrian traffic.
