The Grand Opera House, Part 2, 1923–37: The Long Goodbye
The Grand Opera House, looking solid but not quite so grand, early 1930s — and oh so many and various products to take in from the street and sidewalk. That building is long gone; the Turner building next door remains in place today. John Hill, China shop, and Rutherford & Nugent, real estate, share the storefront spaces. To get to the balcony you entered the alleyway on the right side. Billboards had long sent forth their compelling messages fronting the street sidewalk to the left. Peterborough Museum and Archives (PMA), Balsillie Collection of Roy Studio Images, PG3 20a.
For the first chapter of this story, see Part 1: “The Grand Opera House, 1905—23, The Glory Years.”
Vernon’s City of Peterborough Directory, 1925, p.3.
The long, slow decline of the once thriving Grand Opera House is a now-familiar story of corporate intervention into local enterprises — which in the 1920s was a relatively new (though steadily creeping) phenomenon.
In that decade the Famous Players Canadian Corporation, under the “virtual control” of the U.S. Famous Players (FP) parent, was on a mission both to increase the number of theatres that it operated in Canada and do away with its prime competition. The success of that campaign — and, in essence, an FP monopoly — led to the closing of both the Royal Theatre (in 1925) and, eventually, the opera house. By 1941 all that was left of the Grand Opera House was a scattering of rusty nails on George Street.
The fall of the Trans-Canada Theatre Company
By the mid-1920s, although the live performances and motion pictures kept flowing through the building with determined regularity, all was not going particularly well at the Grand Opera House.
Examiner, Dec. 22, 1922, p.11. The shows failed to attract large audiences. Perhaps The Mikado had been presented one too many times in the city. Hopper made the poem “Casey at the Bat” famous, recording it in 1909 and apparently reciting it over 10,000 times, three of which were in Peterborough.
In January 1923, for instance, the theatre had disappointing audiences for a prestigious travelling company that was expected to do much better: the well-known American actor, singer, comedian, and theatrical producer DeWolf Hopper.
By the middle of that year the Grand’s corporate owner, Trans-Canada Theatre Company, was in big trouble. “For the last year or two theatrical business has been very bad,” the bosses said, as they announced “heavy losses.” A spokesperson suggested, “The show business had slumped badly and it seemed the public would not patronize good drama.” Booking fees had dropped sharply, and the company’s total liabilities were growing; it had an urgent need to raise about $25,000 to cover current needs.
The losses were spread over 116 houses – including theatres in Edmonton, Kingston, Hamilton, and Toronto as well as Peterborough – with the fate of all of those theatres now up in the air. Despite an argument on the part of some investors that the “slump” was over, and reorganization was possible, a company shareholders’ meeting decided to liquidate. As an account in the New York Clipper put it: “This marks the end of a big and better theatrical enterprise in Canada.”
In Peterborough the Grand reopened as usual that fall, still under Trans-Canada and the local management of Harold W. Bickell. The many bookings that fall offered “variety to suit all tastes” – from local favourites such as the Dumbells and Ernie Marks Stock Co. to Harvey’s and Gus Hill’s “World Famous Minstrels.” Large audiences turned out for a performance of David Copperfield with Bransby Williams (and His All-English Company). The Peter Robinson chapter of the IODE served as ushers, as its members had been doing for some time.
In 1924, in addition to many live stage attractions, the opera house continued to screen the “big pictures” of the day, such as D.W. Griffith’s The White Rose (1923) and the first big Western epic (and huge success), The Covered Wagon (1924).
Examiner, March 20, 1923, p.11. One of the regular motion picture attractions at the Grand — “The First English Super-Picture.” The Game of Life (1922), from G.B. Samuelson Productions, was indeed the first British ten-reel feature, as advertised. Little appears to be known about it except that it presented the “great events of Queen Victoria’s reign seen through the eyes of three girls.” Survival status is unknown. Screened at “popular prices.”
Examiner, Feb. 7, 1924, p.7. Of particular note is that management made clear that the Peterborough audience would not be able to see this film — the big picture of the year — at a cheaper price for quite some time.
Examiner, Feb. 11, 1924, p.9. Movies had become so much the norm that for this stage play the Grand was again pointing out, “Not a Picture.”
The beleaguered Trans-Canada holds fast (for a while) and announces a big arrangement with United Artists to bring their pictures for first runs in Peterborough, sometimes to fill in “gaps between the road shows.” With the standard high-blown promise: “Picture offerings of this magnitude have never been shown continuously in Peterboro before.”
Vernon’s City of Peterborough Directory, 1925, p.149.
Despite the tenuous Trans-Canada ownership situation, then, the Grand remained very much in business. In the Peterborough Directory of 1925 it continued to advertise itself as “High Class Attractions – Pictures and Vaudeville” (the last time it would do so).
Local businessmen step in to (apparently) save the day
In autumn 1924 the liquidated Trans-Canada was replaced in ownership by a number of local businessmen who, like knights in shining armour, seemingly stepped in to save the day: Roland Glover, the Examiner’s managing editor; Robert R. Hall, prominent barrister and solicitor (and former member for Peterborough West in the House of Commons); and accountant Gustavus (“Gus”) L. Hay, the Examiner’s secretary-treasurer. They would handle the opera house business affairs through the Examiner offices.
They bought the Grand Opera House for “less than a fifth” of what Trans-Canada had paid for it, perhaps $20,000. Harold Bickell was soon gone as manager.
As well-known city librarian Fred M. de la Fosse wrote almost twenty years later, this last shift of ownership “boded badly for the future of the time-honoured drama with its stage and footlights.” The motion pictures, he argued, were thoroughly taking over in the mind of the general public; at a cheaper price the movies appealed to more people who wanted “to see the counterfeit presentments of players and plays.”
Examiner, Feb. 18, 1925, p.11. Vaudeville and a motion picture.
The new local owners continued to stress live stage action. The theatre was providing the “opportunity of seeing plays such as are presented in the larger centres.” In an effort to make ends meet the owners were telling anyone interested that the opera house “may be rented for local events at a figure considerably reduced from other seasons.”
The “Grand Tries to Please Everyone” said a headline at the beginning of October. It was bringing “a number of diversified attractions to the city” and – quite significantly – “endeavouring to meet the wishes and satisfy the tastes of all classes in the community.” The owners issued a warning: “To bring attractions such as these . . . requires a large outlay on the part of the company and the theatre management both, and it is necessary that the patronage be sufficient to reimburse them for the expenses entailed.”
The fall of 1925 saw an impressive list of live attractions, but still with a mix of motion pictures, now booked from the Canadian distributor Dominion Films (which soon became Independent Films). As in the cases of Racing for Life (U.S., 1924) and Midnight Express (U.S., 1924), produced by the Columbia Productions studio, the “feature pictures” were combined with vaudeville attractions. Ticket prices remained higher than those in the other two local theatres.
In the end the novice owners (looking after the Royal Theatre as well) appear to have booked more motion pictures than they could handle. When Hay tried to cancel a number of contracts, Dominion said, no, you cannot do that. In May 1925 the Grand Opera House refused to accept films sent to the theatre, causing more problems. The dispute led to a hearing in the York County Court (Dominion Films Ltd. v. Mr. G.L. Hay et al.). Eventually, although they insisted they had fulfilled their contracts, the opera house owners had to pay out a sum of $177.41 to the film distributor.
The Grand’s local owners — doing business with Dominion/Independent Films in Toronto. An invoice for publicity/advertising materials, Feb. 7, 1925. Dominion Films vs. Hay file, PMA, F450.
The cost of renting a film for three days. Dominion Films vs. Hay file, PMA, F450.
One of a series of letters and documents trying to sort out the problems related to contracted films. Dominion Films vs. Hay file, PMA, F450.
Letter from Ludwig & Ballantyne to Roland Glover, Feb. 16, 1926, after the transition to Theatrical Enterprises, with list of contracts still outstanding. Dominion Films vs. Hay file, PMA, F450.
A Famous Players Canadian takeover
Film Daily, Jan. 27, 1926, p.1.
Especially for someone like Roland Glover, who had a newspaper to run, the complexities and extra concerns of film exhibition (with two theatres to take care of) may have proven a bit too much; and in the midst of all the activity, big changes were coming, unbeknownst to most theatregoers.
Bent on its mission to eliminate competition, in 1925 Famous Players Canadian acquired the holdings of Trans-Canada Ltd. and Theatrical Enterprises, Ltd. (which became a 100 per cent subsidiary of Famous Players); by the end of the year Famous Players had seized control of more than eighty theatres across the country. As exhibitors were finding out, “Famous Players is in the market for any type of theatre acquisition.” Among other moves, FP took over former Trans-Canada theatres in London and Kingston, Ont. (both of which were named “the Grand”). In Peterborough the Grand Opera House and Royal Theatre fell into the trap.
Weekly Examiner, Dec. 3, 1925, np; also Examiner, Nov. 28, 1925, p.17. But instead of safeguarding and “guarantee[ing] high class entertainment which is so necessary in a city the size of Peterboro,” the transaction led to the speedy closure of one theatre, the Royal, and the gradual fading out of the Grand Opera House.
In November 1925 the local owners leased rights for the Grand Opera House and Royal Theatre to the FP subsidiary, Theatrical Enterprises. The local men continued to manage it.
In outlining the Peterborough situation, a 1931 federal investigation stated in no uncertain terms: “It was felt that all the theatres in that town should be operated for the benefit of Paramount Theatres Ltd.”
In the actual deal fashioned with Paramount Peterborough Theatres Ltd. (owners of the Capitol, and a subsidiary of Famous Players Canadian Corporation), Hay, Glover, and Hall legally agreed to “demise and lease . . . The Grand Opera House building and the site upon which it is built including the Stores or Shops” to Theatrical Enterprises Ltd. The agreement was explicit (and revealing of the motion picture theatre minutiae of the times):
“ . . . together with two Moving Picture Machines, two Spot Lights, two Pianos, one Ticket Chopper, Box Office Equipment, all Scenery and Stage Equipment, Electric signs, Pictures and Photo Frames, Electric fittings and lights, one electric motor, all brass rails and drapes and all fittings and fixtures connected therewith in and about said premises.”
This all-encompassing deal, initially for a period of eighteen months (open to renewal), called on the lessee, Theatrical Enterprises, to pay $275 a month rent to the lessors, Hay, Glover, and Hall. It carried an important proviso. As the 1931 investigation put it, the parties agreed that adult ticket prices at the Grand Opera House “for motion pictures or vaudeville, or stock companies, or travelling amusement companies” could not be less than 25 cents.
The arrangement reflected a nationwide trend. Opera houses across the country were being bought up – and promptly closed – with the goal of eliminating competition to movie theatres. Peterborough’s opera house was not, at least immediately, closed down, but in the following years it would be only a shadow of its former self.
Control of the Grand Opera House had, then, evolved from local hands (Bradburn followed by Turner) to large Canadian firms (Ambrose Small and Trans-Canada) and back to the local (Hay, Glover, and Hall) before finally ending up with a U.S. subsidiary of Famous Players, Theatrical Enterprises.
Under the conditions laid down, the theatre, which remained under the ownership and general management of Glover, Hall, and the Gus Hayes Estate, was indeed “open for road shows, and occasionally rented” for local acts or events.
A George Street parade (featuring the Peterborough Pipe Band) celebrating the 60th anniversary of Confederation, July 1, 1927. With the Comstock Furniture and Undertaking store, billboards, Grand Opera House, and J.J. Turner & Sons in the background. A Roy Studios photographer turned out that day and took a lengthy series of photos of the parade. Peterborough Museum and Archives (PMA), Balsillie Collection of Roy Studio Images, 2000-012-016188-69.
The theatre was clearly, though, under the control of Famous Players — most tellingly because it was the Capitol Theatre’s managers in charge of the Grand’s limited prospects. When a series of “Ushers Wanted” (female) notices for the opera house appeared in the daily paper, they advised anyone interested to apply not at the Grand but at the Capitol Theatre. Glover, using the account books of the Peterborough Examiner, Ltd., administered the local financial transactions (for a while the Examiner carried the interest on the Grand’s mortgage, which had been in place since the purchase of the property). Significantly, the other seemingly independent local theatre owner, Schneider-Rishor Ltd. (holders of the Regent), was also part of the arrangement with Famous Players and Paramount Peterborough; they too had entered the corporate fold and were equally protecting their interests.
The Grand Opera House, 1928 (probably September), still with the Trans-Canada name up top, and down below scattered posters announcing the appearance of the London stage actor Gordon McLeod. George Street still has its streetcar tracks. PMA, Balsillie Collection of Roy Studio Images, GOH 2000-012-003826-1.
From 1925 through almost all of the following decade, Peterborough in essence had only two motion picture theatres (Capitol and Regent). The Grand Opera House continued to offer live attractions and provide a space for local affairs; for a brief time it screened the occasional motion picture at the stipulated higher ticket prices – thus presumably also attracting a more upscale audience.
In March 1926, when Jas. D. Fletcher succeeded A.G. Crowe as manager of the Capitol, he also became manager of the defunct Royal and the Grand Opera House. Fletcher had previously been manager of the York Theatre, Toronto; both he and Crowe, one article said, were “known in many cities of the Dominion.” When Fletcher’s successor, Jack Stewart, arrived at the Capitol in 1928, he also had responsibility for the Grand.
In 1926 the Grand’s staff included Walter Noyes, John G. Irwin, and John Trennum. But soon the Grand appears to have let all its former employees go. John Trennum went to work as head usher of the Capitol. By 1927–28 long-time employee Noyes had left the theatre to be a general labourer (he would turn up again at the Capitol in the 1940s). In 1929 the city directory, in its annual account of the local attributes, admitted that the city had just two moving picture theatres and an opera house.
Fire insurance map, 1929, PMA. The street on the left is George, with Water Street on the right. The “moving picture theatre” at the top is the Capitol. “Furniture” is the Comstock store, which included undertaking services. The billboards lining the sidewalk to the north of the theatre were covering up an array of sheds offering various services. “B’sm”: a blacksmith shop was tucked in there, facing Water St.
The Depression years — and decline
With the coming of the Great Depression the more expensive “legitimate shows” live on the stage of the Grand suffered a severe decline, with the house offering only occasional events.
After years of government inattention to independent exhibitors’ complaints, and especially a spring 1930 stock deal that placed 94 per cent of Famous Players Canadian Corporation in the hands of the U.S. Paramount company, the federal Conservative government (elected in 1930) struck a commission to examine the state of the motion picture industry in Canada. It would especially inquire into the operations of Famous Players Canadian, a matter of particular interest to Peterborough, and especially to the operation of the Grand Opera House.
Under the provisions of the Combines Investigation Act, it was supposed to be “an offence to operate a combine if it works or is likely to work to the detriment or against the interests of the public.” Arthur Cohen, managing director of Famous Players Canadian, countered that the company had done nothing at all “detrimental to the interests of the Canadian public” and that there had been “not a solitary complaint” on the part of the picture-going public as to what they were able to see in their local theatres.
Shortly after the inquiry was struck, Famous Players announced that it would be pruning its operations, lopping off some of its “deadwood houses.” Motion Picture News again made a point that was directly applicable to Peterborough: “Most of the houses slated for the discard are from the wreckage of the ill-fated Trans-Canada legit chain, a post-war error on the part of ambitious Canadian showmen. Some of them date to the days of the Ambrose Small circuit.”
Among those houses was the seldom-used Grand Opera House; the “local interests” who were running it under the conditions of a restrictive contract with FP were now finding little to do with the aging venue. FP’s other holding, the Royal, had already firmly locked its doors.
The Grand’s last motion picture shows, and a declining list of (mostly local) attractions
In the beleaguered years of the Depression, then, that oldest, largest, most proud, and distinguished of the city’s venues, the Grand Opera House, uttered its last, largely unnoticed, gasps.
Examiner, Sept. 7, 1929, p.13. Announced — “in the Flesh and Blood Real Living Actors” — but this promised event did not happen. Around the same time Warner Brothers turned the musical into an early “talkie” (released April 1929): “the first Broadway musical to be Vitaphoned in its entirety.” The movie’s cast included Myrna Loy, who easily made the shift from silent films (in which she was a bit of a vamp) to a long and solid career in “sound” pictures.
An early warning sign was the plight of The Desert Song, a lavish musical that had opened on Broadway in 1926 and was touring the continent in 1929. The live show was announced for the Grand Opera House in early September 1929, only to be cancelled less than a week later. As manager Stewart stated, “Business does not warrant continuation of the tour.” Broadway itself had gone into a severe decline in the late 1920s. The trend was already in place, with a drift to fewer and fewer dates, even before the talking pictures arrived and the Depression had set in.
In June 1928, when the motion picture Wings returned to the Grand (after first screening in February), an Examiner article had lamented how “so-called legitimate theatres” in big cities everywhere had “capitulated” to movies, pointing to seven theatres in New York City that had gone over to “big features . . . theatres that hitherto have been almost exclusively the home of the spoken drama and musical comedy.” Says U.S. cinema historian Douglas Gomery, “If the coming of sound caused the end of the stage show, the Great Depression buried it.” Potential audience members had to watch their diminished spare change now more than ever.
Examiner, June 4, 1928, p.9. The last motion picture to appear at the Grand Opera House, a full year before the “talkies” arrived. Though no one knew it at the time, it was the first Oscar winner for best picture (awarded a year later). It had been screened a few months earlier, in February, when the lowest price for adults in the evening was $1.00.
Examiner, Jan. 31, 1928, p.3. Around that same time, ticket prices at the Capitol and Regent evenings ranged from 35 to 50 cents; at the Regent children’s evening tickets were 20 cents.
Even so, by the mid-1930s patrons could still get their travelling stage shows — if more modest in scale than in the grand days of the opera house — at the Capitol Theatre, and at lower admission prices too: for instance, in the “big stage show” Manhattan on Parade, which came to the movie theatre along with a Barbara Stanwyck film in December 1935; or, “direct from Hollywood,” Billy Barty “in person” – the “diminutive star of ‘Mickey McGuire’ and “Our Gang’ Comedies, assisted by company of four.”
While the popularity and lower prices of silent pictures played a part in the initial decline of the Grand Opera House, the driving force was the Famous Players monopoly and the corporation’s fierce determination to protect its own interests in the Capitol – most particularly, by strictly maintaining higher ticket prices for opera house events, whether live or motion picture.
Examiner, May 1, 1928, p.13. Ben Hur returns, at lower ticket prices.
For instance: not long after the Grand Opera House screened The Big Parade (1925) and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1927), those pictures had return engagements, “at popular prices,” at the Capitol. The initial 1925 contract of Theatrical Enterprises (the Famous Players subsidiary) with the local owners was renewed from time to time, and, as the 1931 federal investigation indicated, the Grand thus remained under the thumb of the corporation. All of this meant that the Capitol had no competition other than the smaller Regent (which had also, quite quietly, shifted into corporate hands).
At the Grand, given the few road shows and only occasional local rentals, and with the high costs of maintaining the huge, expensive space, the losses of maintaining a virtually empty building mounted. The income from Theatrical Enterprises ($275 a month in 1926) was not enough. In 1927 Roland Glover had raised concerns around the expense of the electrical wiring (between $1,500 and $1,700) that was considered necessary to bring the building up to standards for the Hydro-Electric inspector. Even if the local businessmen who owned the Grand (and leased it to Theatrical Enterprises) wanted to show motion pictures at higher ticket prices, the renovations required to install the equipment necessary for the talkies were prohibitive. The now not-so-grand opera house became a lonely, neglected, and deteriorating place.
By spring 1935 an Examiner writer was lamenting:
“It is seldom that Peterborough has a chance to patronize the Opera House. The theatre which in former days resounded almost nightly during the season to the voices of actors and actresses, many of them among the great people of the Thespian world, now is ‘dark’ the year ‘round, and Peterborough play-lovers have only the cinema to entertain their fancy for the mimic world of the theatre.”
“Even by the most generous recollections,” another Examiner writer, Pete McGillen, noted in 1948 as he looked back on the glory days of the opera house, the once grand theatre had come to seem drafty, shabby, and (with its hard seats) uncomfortable – “a white elephant.”
From 1930 to 1937 the Grand offered only a few attractions, and except for regular visits by the Dumbells (who made their final appearance at the opera house in autumn 1932), they tended to be local affairs. The opera house soon saw the last of its travelling plays — Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude in March 1932 — and when the Georgia Minstrels appeared on Feb. 2, 1933, they represented the last travelling attraction to appear on its stage.
Vernon’s City of Peterborough Directory, 1934, p.337. Listed as “closed,” but it wasn’t, at least completely.
As early as 1934 the Vernon’s City of Peterborough Directory (which would have contained results surveyed in 1933) listed the Grand Opera House as “closed.” Some three years before that, the 1931 federal White Commission report also presented the theatre as “closed.” Yet those entries did not represent the facts on the ground; from October 1933 to spring 1937 the doors did manage to swing open now and again, but for entirely local events.
Despite the local ownership, and based on the leases fashioned in the mid-1920s, control remained in the hands of Famous Players; Jack Stewart of the Capitol (and FP) managed what little there was to do with the theatre.
The Hanson corporation — and plans for a “Granada” movie palace
Perhaps more than anything else, the ticket prices in the hard-put 1930s took their toll. Admission to the Grand Opera House usually required an output of at least 50 cents – and that was for the cheap seats high up in the “gods.” A ticket to the Capitol or Regent could be had for half that price – and for better, more comfortable seats. The movies, with their combination of film and music, were simply more affordable, and their daily schedules offered a greater variety of choices. Seats at even a local presentation at the Grand Opera House in April 1934 (The Mikado, presented by the Choir and Men’s Association of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church) ranged from $1.00 to 50 cents (students 25 cents) – while good seats could be had at the Capitol or Regent for 25 to 35 cents, and cheaper for children and/or matinees. And the movie house hours provided greater flexibility.
Examiner, May 6, 1937, p.11. A final glimpse of the yearly pageant, the Grand Opera House’s last hurrah.
Examiner, May 13, 1937, p.9. Once again, promises are made.
In early May 1937 the Grand Opera House hosted the annual Y.W.C.A. Pageant — which would be the final “show” presented on its stage.
Less than a week after the May 8 pageant the Examiner issued an important announcement: in “a real estate deal of major importance,” the local owners had sold the property to the Hanson Theatre Corporation of Toronto, which had big plans for the theatre space. It proposed to renovate the Grand Opera House into a new, efficient, modern theatre.
Ironically – and tellingly – the deal was put through by Harry Dahn, a man who, as the paper assured its readers, was “well-remembered here as manager of the Grand.”
Dahn, appointed manager of the Grand Opera House after the Ambrose Small takeover in 1919, had departed in May 1920 to join Famous Players Canadian. He had hopped around from theatre to theatre (including stops in Regina and Toronto) before spending six years at Montreal’s Capitol (where he developed something of a reputation for the presentation of stage shows along with the movies). In 1930 he became division manager of FP, headquartered in Toronto; shortly after that he went to Winnipeg as western territory manager for the company before returning to Montreal and its Capitol Theatre in 1934. In autumn 1936 Dahn had joined Hanson Theatre Corp. as supervisor of theatres.
Motion Picture Herald, April 5, 1941, p.12. Hanson had his fingers in more than one “Granada.” Here Hanson, on the right, is presenting Wannie Tyers, manager of the Granada, St. Thomas, with a silver plaque as winner of the O.H. Hanson prize for “leadership in promotional activities” among managers of the Hanson circuit of Canada.
The news report did not indicate that Dahn, who was to be in charge of transforming the opera house, was a career FP executive. It also did not mention that Hanson Theatre Corporation was in effect a subsidiary of Famous Players. As an associate of the Famous Players president Nathan L. Nathanson, by 1936 Oscar Hanson controlled eighteen movie houses for Famous Players in Ontario. Hanson had been serving as the agent for Nathanson in acquiring theatres that were in competition with the corporation. Peterborough’s Grand Opera House was one of those items. (Around this same time, too, the Regent Theatre fell under the sway of Hanson as well.)
The speculation was that the Hanson company would lay out considerable cash to modernize the theatre, in the process providing the city with “a first rank entertainment house.”
Architectural plans for alterations to the Grand Opera House had been drawn up by June 1937. “Granada [G.O.H.] – “Aug. 1938 – 1 set of proposed plans,” Archives of Ontario, RG 54-10, 29.4.
“Granada [G.O.H.] – “Aug. 1938 – 1 set of proposed plans,” Archives of Ontario, RG 54-10, 29.4.
The plans for renovating the Grand were extensive — with an estimated cost of $60,000 (about $1,097,000 today), supervised by Dahn and with a design drawn up by well-travelled theatre architect Harold B. Kaplan. The new owners stated their intentions to remove the theatre’s two balconies (perhaps replacing them with one), put in a new cement floor, transform the lobby, and install a new marquee outside, among other things. They would redecorate the whole place. According to a report, “The building will be up-to-date in every particular and will be available if required for stage shows in as much as stage accommodation will be preserved.” Now, as proposed, with some 800 seats (making it a couple of hundred seats smaller than the Capitol), the theatre would be “the last word in comfort and beauty.”
The theatre would sport a new name – The Granada – a moniker that Famous Players regularly employed when transforming opera houses into movie theatres (it did the same in Hamilton and Chatham, for instance).
Examiner, July 10, 1937, p.5. The seats leave the building. Among this group are the key figures of Harry Dahn (second from left) and R.M. (Rollie) Glover, long-time Examiner owner and partner in the Grand Opera House. The photographer was the Cripps Studio, which had been kicked out of its storefront space in the opera building to allow renovations to happen.
At the end of June Dahn and Kaplan arranged for a building permit and announced that work would commence the following week. With plans drawn up and officially approved by June 28, 1937, the owners estimated that the “wrecking operations” and remodelling would take three months. By August a tenant occupying one of the theatre’s storefront spaces – Fred Cripps, with a photography studio – had to vacate.
Peterborough at last would have what the newspaper referred to as “a modern movie palace.” The Granada had a semi-official presence: it and its 800 seats were listed in the Film Daily yearbooks of 1938, 1940, and 1941 as an established Peterborough movie theatre. An article in a November 1937 issue of Film Daily erroneously listed it as already “reopened.”
With the groundwork prepared, the new owners quickly mounted a construction hoarding across the front of the building and applied a durable bright paint announcing a vaguely forthcoming “Grand Opening.” They began to remove the seats. In July Hanson offered a donation of four hundred seats, and possibly more, to the Peterborough Exhibition. The seats, said to be “in good shape,” would be used for a special section being constructed for the grandstand and perhaps in other sections of the grounds. The plans for the opera house called for the old seats to be replaced by more modern versions – and fewer in number.
The Grand Opera House is still there in this detail from a 1940 photo of the Capitol Theatre (where there is a lineup on the left). PMA, VR 4574-5.
By mid-September, though, renovations had not progressed beyond the point of questions around who would do the work – with Peterborough men being given preference.
For the next three years passersby could stop and reflect on the “Grand Opening” sign – until, as an Examiner writer put it towards the end of 1940, “with three theatres operating here now, it seems that the Grand as a theatre must be relegated into the limbo of things that will never be.” The hall was seen fit to be used for a rummage sale in fall 1937, but that was about it.
Still, rumors continued to circulate about a theatre chain possibly doing some renovations on the building. The vacant area immediately to the north (partly hidden by billboards) had also recently changed ownership, purchased by a firm called the Northland Theatre Company, which led to rumours of a fourth theatre in town, quite apart from the issue of the Granada. N.L. Nathanson and the Odeon Company apparently had an interest in this other new venture; Nathanson had recently parted company from Famous Players.
In spring 1941 neighbour J.J. Turner and Sons complained to city council that the owners of the Grand Opera House property had “surely had ample times to make the changes that were announced at the time the property was purchased” and that they should now remove the “unsightly” high barricade. City council proposed writing to the owners to indicate that they should “do something to restore something of the appearance of the theatre front.”
Examiner, May 20, 1941, p.9.
Yet that appears to have been the end of the news about the renovations, the Granada, and the great new theatre palace expected to arise from the ashes of the old opera house. Somewhere along the way the Hanson company, or perhaps its parent figure, Famous Players, decided on a change of tack. Why it was never announced to the public remains a matter of conjecture. Early on, undoubtedly, the corporation decided the profits were just not there. Perhaps their original optimism had not taken into account the 1939 establishment of a third theatre, the Centre, in the city. And then, after September 1939, the war came into play, to great effect. Under great financial pressures (and especially the “tremendous demand for steel required for munitions and other war purposes”), the federal government introduced an Order in Council that blocked unnecessary or costly construction of civilian buildings; it prohibited repairs exceeding $2,500 to existing buildings or the installation of equipment costing $5,000; or the erection of new buildings costing $10,000 and over. Any new building would now have to wait.
As the Examiner suggested, “Even the most exuberant greater Peterborough spirits could hardly put forth the idea that this city needs another theatre while the British people are fighting with everything they have got for their freedom.”
Still, the company did have over two years – from plans being drawn in June 1937 to the beginning of war in September 1939 – to begin the renovations, which means that the war was not the main culprit. As it turned out, behind the scenes the Famous Players Canadian, or its U.S. parent, formulated other plans for the site occupied by the Grand Opera House.
For whatever reason, the idea of a “Granada” movie palace in Peterborough fell by the wayside, with little or no ripple through the press.
1941 Film Daily Yearbook, p.896. The “Granada” was for real; it makes an entry (and in the 1940 yearbook as well).
Clouds of dust, and pedestrians come running
The Hanson interests disappeared from the scene, too; and somewhere in that time Famous Players quietly and more directly claimed possession of the property. In May 1941 Hanson resigned as president of the company that bore his name, and shortly after that Famous Players Canadian Corporation “absorbed” the remaining twenty-five or thirty houses of the Hanson circuit, including the Regent.
The parent company turned out to have other ideas for Peterborough, including tearing down the 1905 building and starting over from scratch with a brand-new structure. But it would be almost a decade before that new building would come into play.
Examiner, Nov. 29, 1941, p.10. The residue of the Grand Opera House: seemingly no end to what you could salvage from the wreckage.
Meanwhile the Peterborough Metal and Waste Company purchased rights to the salvage, and demolition began in earnest on Monday, Dec. 1, 1941:
“The curtain fell for the last time when workmen unhooked the robes high in the rigging loft, to send the old curtain tumbling in a cloud of dust to the stage floor, blanketing the footlights that had glimmered on the silk-clad legs of a thousand choruses.”
The wreckers carted away and sold what they could.
A few weeks later people strolling on the block north of Charlotte St. noticed a mysterious scattering of nails on the sidewalk – “old fashioned ‘cut nails,’” a little fire-burnt, perhaps, or “at least . . . deeply rust-bitten.” One theory posited that they had been dropped by foraging downtown pigeons, which had picked them up from “the remains of demolished ambition” that was once the Grand Opera House.
“Grand Theatre site (Looking West from Water St. Toward George St.), June 1944.” The Turner Building is to the left of the now empty space, which would in 1948 become the home of the Paramount Theatre. Across George Street are the buildings on the west side. Library and Archives Canada, 1996-135, Folder Cinemas_CN (Ont) 4435.
One day towards the end of May 1942 a great noise drew a crowd on George Street. “A thunderous crack, followed by clouds of dust, brought pedestrians on the run,” reported the Examiner. “The crack was the last moan of regret of the north wall, and all that remained was a heap of rubble with bricks scattered in every direction. Soon another landmark will be gone.” Within a year or two all that remained was the outline of the concrete base.
What once was proud and worthy – proclaimed on its birth thirty-six years earlier as “One of the Most Up-to-Date and Commodious Theatres in Canada,” a place that “compares most favorably with any in Canada and in the matter of stage accommodation is probably superior to all but one or two.” In autumn 1906 that stage had been graced by a young Julius Marx (later known as Groucho), and in the long busy years after that it had held many of the bright performing stars of the time. It was now truly finished.
Gone but far from forgotten
Local theatre-lovers mourned the loss of the Grand Opera House and what they called “legitimate theatre” over many long years — in the process tending to forget that the opera house screened almost as many motion pictures as it staged live performances.
In the mid-1940s the Examiner’s new editor Robertson Davies – later to become an eminent playwright and novelist – lamented in editorial after editorial the city’s need for a proper stage that would allow “legitimate” or “living” theatre to come to town.
Examiner, Feb. 1, 1916, p.3. From the lost glory days of the Grand Opera House.
In February 1946, just to give one instance, Davies looked back on how in 1916 patrons of the opera house had been able to see “Mrs. Patrick Campbell and her London Company in G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion.” At the time Pygmalion was a relatively new play (written in 1912, opening in London in 1914). “Mrs. Pat,” Davies said, was one of the finest players ever to perform the role of the flower girl – and she did it “right here in Peterborough.” The story is that Shaw had written the play expressly for Mrs. Campbell. Davies added:
“Those days are gone, and perhaps we shall never see anything like them again. Now our drama consists of the movies, so contemptuously dismissed by one of Noel Coward’s characters as “a cheesy photograph”; as well as the movies we have the radio, a mechanical device without beauty or romance, and pathetically afraid of ideas. We have nothing today which inspires expectation, and what the French call “the sense of an occasion” as the theatre did in the days of the Grand Opera House.”
Earlier days on George Street, looking south, with the Grand Opera House on the left. A detail from a larger photo, PMA 2000-012-002675-1.
An eyewitness to that great Campbell performance remarked thirty years later, “There seems to be something wrong with a society that demolishes its theatres, and I don’t mean movie houses.”
Davies himself could only sit and wonder as to whether cities like Peterborough, which had lost their theatres, had become “markedly more provincial in 1946 than we were in 1916?” It was a reflection all the more telling because it was coming from someone who was fond of taking in a motion picture on a regular basis.
Another editorial (in 1947) lamenting the loss of the opera house, “When Peterborough Was a ‘Two Night Stand,’” reasoned that the city “was once more closely in touch with the world of music and the theatre than it is now,” listing all the grand companies and notable actors that had for a time included the city in their itineraries. “The loss of our theatres and the consequent decline of the touring companies has left us artistically poorer.”
In general critics decried “the lack of plays” on circuit in the country. In a Canadian Press article published in the Examiner in April 1947, a writer complained: “The new generation is largely unaware of the beauties of stagecraft. For them the motion picture – and to some extent, radio – supplies the principal form of entertainment.” (Though he was encouraged by the current revival of the Dominion Drama Festival.)
That same year Fred de la Fosse pondered the decline of professional live theatre and the shift of attention to the pictures and provided a glimpse into the future:
Examiner, March 2, 1951, p.7. Make way: always room for live theatre.
“The world is big enough for both forms of education and amusement. Possibly when television is perfected the generation then living will be able to enjoy still another form of drama, seated placidly in their easy chairs at home sipping their coffee or tea in comfort and seeing and hearing performers on a distant stage enacting their parts in perfect precision with the aid of reflectors and audiphones.”
Despite the mystery of “reflectors and audiphones,” that home-based living-room future would continue to unfold over the coming decades – although, indeed, there would also always be live theatre and thriving drama, comedy, and musical extravaganzas, even in Peterborough.
Live theatre and the Galaxy
Some five years after the demolition of the Grand Opera House — with its site taken over by the new Paramount Theatre — an Examiner editorial (probably written by Robertson Davies) was warning the city to “beware of what it destroys.”
Lamenting the loss, the editorial cited a delayed and painful recognition of “the need for an auditorium of its capacity . . . To build one now requires more money than the authorities could find to include in the new City Hall plans.”
In the 1950s, campaigns to have a suitable auditorium added to plans for both the new city hall and the new Memorial Centre did not work out. The professional Summer Theatre headed by Michael Sadlier used the Queen Mary Auditorium for its productions. It would be four decades before the Showplace Performance Centre was established; and a little longer still before a refurbished Market Hall Performing Arts Centre became a brilliant gem in the middle of the city.
These days Peterborough has only one mega-corporate movie theatre, the Galaxy (now in the hands of the huge British company Cineworld), offering minimal choice and variety. That facility offers nothing like that Grand Opera House promise of 1925: “endeavouring to meet the wishes and satisfy the tastes of all classes in the community.”
Still, a certain irony abounds: in the third decade of the 21st century the city does have a plethora of independent live-theatre venues, including not just Showplace and Market Hall but also the Theatre Guild, Theatre on King, Gordon Best Theatre, and (out in the nearby countryside) 4th Line Theatre — all of them, as Davies so wished years earlier, “inspir[ing] expectation” and “the sense of an occasion.”
Thanks especially (and as usual) to the helpful folk at Trent Valley Archives and Peterborough Museum and Archives, John Wadland, and, as always, Ferne Cristall.