Protecting the Garneau Theatre
by Lawrence Herzog
It's Our Heritage | Vol. 27 No. 27 | July 09, 2009
File photo
The city is moving to protect the Garneau Theatre, one of Edmonton’s great surviving examples of early modernism, the movement that gave rise to Moderne or art deco architecture. This month, city council is considering a request from its owner to designate the exterior of the 69-year-old theatre a Municipal Historic Resource.
Designed by renowned architect William Blakey, the theatre at 8708-28 109th Street opened in 1940. Today the Garneau is the only surviving theatre of its style and period anywhere in the province.
If designation is granted by city council, the owner will be eligible for up to $547,000 in municipal funds to assist with the cost of rehabilitating the building’s exterior. Time has taken its toll, and work is needed to restore the masonry, cladding, roofing, doors and windows, stucco, finishes and signage.
Developer John Day wants to restore the exterior, and particularly the retail portion of the theatre’s frontage, to its near original condition. In all, the necessary work is anticipated to tally up to more than $1 million.
The Garneau Theatre “reflects Edmonton embracing modern style of architecture and the social activity of going to the movies,” says the heritage planner’s report to council that recommends designation. “The Garneau Theatre holds its position well when compared to any of the good Art Deco theatres built across Canada during this period, such as the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver also built in 1940.”
The theatre, like the district it calls home, was named for Laurent Garneau, a Métis trader and politician who homesteaded in Strathcona starting in 1874. Garneau’s house was located at 11103 Saskatchewan Drive, where the Humanities Building at the University of Alberta now stands.
Information from the city’s planning and development department indicates that in 1913 the land around the theatre was subdivided by Arthur E. Glover, and six years later the site was purchased by Imperial Oil Limited. The oil company built a service station in 1929, which was demolished to make way for the Garneau Theatre.
When Suburban Theatres announced the proposed construction of the Garneau for the site at 87th Avenue and 109th Street in early 1940, its former president I. F. Shacker moved quickly to build the Varscona Theatre five blocks south at Whyte Avenue. Shacker opened his theatre in July 1940 – three months before the larger and more expensive Garneau, with its rectilinear box measuring 60 feet by 125 feet and reaching 30 feet high.
The Garneau’s grand vertical neon marquee flickered to life for the first time in the fall of 1940 and the theatre officially opened the evening of October 24, with legendary film manager Bill Wilson at the helm. The first presentation was The Great Waltz, a 1938 film starring Luise Rainer and Fernand Gravet. Admission was five cents.
Citizens were suitably impressed and the Edmonton Bulletin called the 780-seat film house, “spacious, attractively designed and modern in every detail. Doors and pillars in the foyer are of gumwood, and add much to the decoration, as does the wall of bricks facing south and bringing rich sunlight into the foyer. After hanging your coat in the complimentary coat check, a young usher or usherette dressed in a scarlet Eton jacket, blue trousers and black pill box hat will 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 you to your seat.”
William Blakey’s design for the Garneau answered the demands of function, budget and elegance. To save money, Blakey designed the balcony behind, not over, the main auditorium. This arrangement was popular among American film and vaudeville theatres from the 1920s through the 1940s.
The construction of the theatre included commercial space on either side of the theatre entrance. The space at the corner of 87 Avenue was designed to be a restaurant and has long been used as one, while the stores north of the theatre entrance have housed a series of retail and service businesses.
The first restaurant was Joan's Coffee Bar, followed by the Garneau Theatre Coffee Shop and, until earlier this year, Pharos Pizza and Spaghetti House. By the 1950s, two billboards had been erected on the north and south sides of the marquee.
The Garneau Theatre was originally an independent house, but in September 1941 it joined the Famous Players chain, ensuring access to good first-run movies. Wilson retired as manager in 1971, 31 years after the doors opened.
For a time in the late 1980s, the theatre was closed and up for sale. But then Magic Lantern Theatres and Independent Theatre Supply rode to the rescue.
In December 1996, false ceilings in the lobby with their “moon rock” plaster were ripped out and the space returned to its original glory. Vintage lighting was installed in the lobby and auditorium, including some precious pieces from the old Varscona, the Royal Theatre in Innisfail, the Grand Theatre in Melfort, Saskatchewan and the Wilma Theatre in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
“The modernism of the Garneau is found in its uncompromising (lines), the use of colour and geometric decoration in the place of historical ornament, and the exploitation of unadorned materials,” the heritage planner’s report says. “The style is usually called Art Deco, a name that originated as a shortened version of the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels, a design fair held in Paris in 1925 which exhibited work of this kind.”
The report notes that the terms Moderne, Modernistic and Streamlined Moderne are also used to describe the style. “Whatever it may be called, this was an important early stage in the international evolution of modern architecture.”
Blakey passed away in 1975 at the ripe old age of 90. His grandest theatre design endures, made all the more precious by the tragic demolition of the Varscona in 1987 and extensive changes to the Roxy, Edmonton’s other Moderne-flavoured theatre that opened in 1938.
Developer John Day has worked with the Garneau neighbourhood and the city to come up with a rehabilitation plan that will preserve and restore the significant historical elements on the building’s exterior. The work will restore and replace masonry, including the two-tone brown brick, along with stainless steel doors, aluminum windows, lighting and Carrara glass.
If the proposal gets council’s approval, it will return the Garneau as close to its original glory as it has been in more than 40 years.
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City Centre closure
but reading the article in the online Edmonton Journal, I noticed that there are a few (don't know if its a significant amount) of people against the closure. 
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