The city spent twenty years calling it cold - then spent twenty million dollars warming it up. Roy Thomson Hall at 60 Simcoe Street in Toronto's entertainment district opened on 13 September 1982 as the home of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Arthur Erickson's curvilinear glass drum replacing the plan once called simply the New Massey Hall. The name honours press baron Roy Thomson, first Lord Thomson of Fleet, whose family's 4.5-million-dollar donation completed the fundraising for the 39-million-dollar building; Itzhak Perlman advised the architects on accessibility, decades before that was standard practice. The original 2,812-seat concrete sphere earned admiration for its looks and complaints for its sound - too wide, too cool, too much reverberation for the orchestra - until a six-month, 20-million-dollar acoustic reconstruction in 2002 by Artec Consultants and KPMB Architects. The fix was surgical: 23 wooden bulkheads shrank the room's volume by an eighth, two motorised wooden canopies weighing nearly fifty tonnes replaced the acrylic discs over the stage, retractable banners tamed the reverberation, and capacity settled at 2,630 on a new Canadian maple floor. Beyond the TSO and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, the hall anchors the Toronto International Film Festival's gala premieres each September and hosts the touring end of the classical, jazz and world-music circuit under its honeycombed glass canopy. St. Andrew station sits across the street, and the sunken garden court around the base gives the financial district one of its few genuinely public architectural pauses - Erickson's dome doing civic work even when the hall is dark. The hall's Gabriel Kney pipe organ - built in London, Ontario - survived the reconstruction intact, and the 2002 project's six years of planning were bankrolled substantially by Ken Thomson, extending the family patronage into a second generation.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 60 Simcoe Street, Toronto, Canada, M5J 2H5

Website: https://www.mhrth.com

Cover Charge: 1

Capacity: 2630

Opening Date: 13/09/1982

Accessible