Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

Seven storeys above one gilded theatre sits another, its ceiling hung with thousands of real beech branches - the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre Centre at 189 Yonge Street in Toronto is the last operating double-decker theatre in the world. Thomas W. Lamb designed the stacked pair as the Canadian flagship of Marcus Loew's vaudeville chain: the lower house opened as Loew's Yonge Street Theatre on 13 December 1913, and the Winter Garden followed upstairs on 16 February 1914. The two rooms were built as contrasts. The Elgin is a classic gilt-and-damask palace of plaster cherubs and faux marble; the Winter Garden was decorated as a rooftop garden in bloom, its columns disguised as tree trunks, its walls hand-painted with watercolour garden scenes and its ceiling canopied in preserved leaves and lanterns. George Burns and Gracie Allen worked the stages in the vaudeville years, and the Elgin later premiered Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz for Canadian audiences as a movie house. Sound cinema killed the upstairs room: the Winter Garden closed on 16 June 1928 and was simply sealed - seats, scenery and paintwork left in the dark for over sixty years, an accidental time capsule that preserved the world's largest collection of vaudeville-era stage flats. The Elgin ground on as a cinema until 1981, when the Ontario Heritage Trust bought the complex and mounted the largest theatre restoration in Canadian history. The 29-million-dollar, two-and-a-half-year project reopened the building on 15 December 1989. Restorers applied 300,000 sheets of aluminum leaf to re-gild the Elgin and cleaned the Winter Garden's fragile watercolour murals with hundreds of pounds of raw bread dough; 5,000 fresh beech branches were harvested and woven into the ceiling grids. An eight-storey backstage pavilion added modern dressing rooms and rehearsal halls. Today the Elgin seats about 1,500 and the Winter Garden about 1,000, hosting musicals, opera, ballet, film festival premieres and concerts as a National Historic Site owned by the Trust. The centre stands opposite the Eaton Centre at Queen subway station, and the guided tours - one of Toronto's best-value heritage experiences - are the only way to see both rooms in daylight.