The Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres are a pair of stacked theatres in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Winter Garden Theatre is seven storeys above the Elgin Theatre.
They are the last surviving Edwardian stacked theatres in the world. The pair were originally built as the flagship ofMarcus Loew's theatre chain in 1913. The building was designed by architect Thomas W. Lamb, who also built the Ed Mirvish Theatre.
Both theatres were built to show vaudeville acts and the short silent movies of the time. Each theatre was intended to compete in a different market. By 1928, feature-length silent films were popular, but sound films were just coming into their own. In 1928 the lower theatre was converted to show sound films and the upper theatre was closed. The Winter Garden remained shuttered for about sixty years. Left inside it was a large collection of vaudeville flats and scenery, now the world's largest surviving collection. In 1969, Loews sold the Elgin to Famous Players. By the 1970s, the Elgin was showing mainly B movies and soft-core pornography.
The Elgin has dancing cherubs, elaborately decorated boxes, vast expanses of gold leaf and plaster sculpting covered in wafer-thin sheets of aluminum, while the Winter Gardens has hand-painted walls and a ceiling decorated with dried beech leaves.
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