The neighbors heard the theatre would become a parking lot and phoned a cinema chain instead - Little Italy keeps its landmarks. The Royal at 608 College Street in Toronto opened in October 1939 as the Pylon Theatre, an Art Moderne house by architect Benjamin Swartz, commissioned by Ray Lewis - the formidable editor-publisher of the Canadian Moving Picture Digest and one of the early Canadian film industry's most influential women. The original operation was a full entertainment compound: 390 seats up front, a roller-skating rink at the rear and a dance hall on the second floor, serving a neighborhood then predominantly British and soon famously Italian. The name followed the demographics - the Pylon became the Royal in the 1950s under Rocco Mastrangelo, later ran Italian-language features, and spent the 1990s as the Golden Princess serving Chinese-language audiences. The parking-lot scare of the late 1990s ended when Festival Cinemas bought the building, spent 200,000 dollars on renovations, cut the seat count to 500 for legroom and reopened it as the Royal on December 6, 1997. Theatre D has owned and operated the venue since 2007 on a split schedule: film and television post-production studio by day, cinema and event house by night. The evening calendar mixes first-run indies, repertory and cult programming with film festivals - the European Union Film Festival and Caribbean Tales among them - plus live comedy and music; the room itself has appeared in features from Take This Waltz to The F Word. Heritage-designated and stubbornly single-screen, the Royal remains College Street's Art Moderne anchor - a 1939 neighborhood theatre still doing neighborhood duty. Ray Lewis' founding stamp gives the building a significance film historians still cite: commissioned by the woman who spent four decades as the Canadian industry's most vocal independent advocate, the Pylon was built as a working argument that exhibitors outside the big chains deserved first-class houses - an argument the Royal is still making, one screening at a time.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 608 College St., Toronto, Canada

Website: https://theroyal.to

Cover Charge: 1

Capacity: 390

Opening Date: 01/10/1939