One of my colleagues at the Dawson Cultural Centre gave me an article wich appeared in the Oct. 26th 1997 edition of the Gazette on the fire at the Park theatre wich ocurred 2 weeks previously. The only victims were 7 firemen due to a collapsing wall and roof.
The theatre was converted to a TV theatre, a church, an ice-cream parlour and a music venue.
By coincidence, I was in the process of doing research on the 4 theatres that existed prior to their conversion.
The theatre opened in 1915 and once was praised as one of Canada's most beautifull theatres, was founded by S.J. Dunning. The theatre had a large balcony, a beautiful decorated lobby, a four-manual pipe organ and 1,172 seats. I saw many movies in this theatre in the 40s and 50s. It is interesting to know that a pioneer by the name of Léo.Ernest Ouimet was the first to build a theatre in Canada and perhaps in North America in 1907, named Ouimetoscope. We have a book on the subject written by one of his descendants, at the SHGV. (in french)
The theatre also had a stage wich presented from Vaudeville acts to choirs, ballet and orchestras. Dunning preferred distributing circulars and at one time had 20,000 printed.
The article is too long to quote every interesting facts as it takes 3 pages of the Gazette written by Mark Abley and will be kept in the SHGV archives.
Guy
2 comments:
Hell Guy,......I Remember a thread with Montreal Movie Theaters as the theme, (a few years back??),and We had many pictures from a lot of the Theaters around Montreal over the years,....all of them over the years have slowly disappeared,.and the plush interiors,with their ornated designs,were left to rot away,unceremoniously,...........those newspaper pics of the Park,are neat to see, I have saved them,............so Thanks Again.......... I get a laugh out of the ad for the Marx Bros,........(I always got a laugh,out of the one liners,which were generally non stop,..........) I wonder how often ,they painted that horse drawn 'car' ,for different movies? HF&RV
hahahahah That previous post ,was to have started as 'Hello' Guy,,,,,,,,,not Hell Guy,............but I suppose it's readable eitherway.........hahahahahaha
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