Elgin Theatre
216 Elgin Street,
Ottawa,
ON
K2P
216 Elgin Street,
Ottawa,
ON
K2P
6 people
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Annonce d'inauguration du 24 décembre 1947 de Le Droit publiée dans la section photo.
Dual Theatre opening December 25th, 1947.
Elgin Dual theatre opening Wed, Dec 24, 1947 – 19 · The Ottawa Citizen (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) · Newspapers.com
and
Elgin Theatre opening 2 Mon, Nov 15, 1937 – 23 · The Ottawa Citizen (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) · Newspapers.com
This opened on November 16th, 1937.
Elgin theatre opening 1 Mon, Nov 15, 1937 – 22 · The Ottawa Citizen (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) · Newspapers.com
This was an old Twinex (Twentieth Century Theatre) house and in the mid-seventies it was dumpy. It had a puny Candy bar and I can remember watching movies in there and hearing the damn projectionist’s radio blaring in the booth. Old-time manager of this theatre was Ernie Warren an old Twinex manager.
Here’s a photo I took of the Elgin when on holiday in 1991.
View link
“CASTLE KEEP” and “GOODBYE,COLUMBUS” were playing on june 1 1970.
The Elgin turns out to have been Canada’s second dual-auditorium theater, according to an article in the April 5, 1947, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The article announced that Twentieth Century Theatres, a Toronto company allied with Famous Players, was planning to add a second auditorium to their Elgin Theatre in Ottawa. But the article also mentioned that a second auditorium was already under construction at the Allen Brothers' Hollywood Theatre in Toronto, and was expected to open shortly.
Three dual-auditorium theaters are known to have already been opened in the United States by that time- two in 1935 and one in 1941. However, these three, and the Hollywood in Toronto, were all operated under a policy of showing the same program in both of their auditoriums. The intention of the operators of the Elgin was to show an entirely different program, consisting of foreign language movies and special attractions, in the new auditorium. The Elgin was probably the first movie theater in the world to do this.
The Boxoffice article gives the seating capacity of the original Elgin as 800, and the capacity of the “Little Elgin” (as it was then being called) as 350.
Interior photo on the restaurant website:
http://www.johnnyfarina.com/gallery.htm
The second screen at the Elgin did indeed open on December 31, 1947. It was the world’s first twin-screen cinema. In response to Hugger1, the Pizza Pizza is a couple doors down the same block. The building where the Elgin Theatre used to be has a Harvey’s, Johnny Farina’s restaurant, a Second Cup and a Great Canadian Bagel.
The Wikipedia article to which Lost Memory links above is in error when it says that the Elgin was the first twin cinema in North America. The Alhambra Theatre in Alhambra, California was given a second auditorium in 1941.
The Wikipedia article is also apparently wrong when it gives a date of 1957 for the addition of a second auditorium to the Elgin Theatre. According to this article in the Canadian Magazine “Take One”, Nat Taylor created his first twin cinema in 1948.
The 2004 obituary of Nat Taylor in the University of Manitoba’s newspaper says that Taylor was operating a twin cinema in Ottawa “by 1948”. While the Elgin is not specifically named in either of these articles, it does seem likely that it is the theatre to which they refer.
The theatres were known as Elgin 1 and Elgin 2, or in earlier times Elgin and Little Elgin.
Now the site of a “Pizza Pizza.”