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The Columbia opened in 1927, in the heyday of North American theatres and during a major building boom in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. It was the region’s only ‘atmospheric’ theatre, a name used to describe the manner of celebrated American architect John Eberson, who transported theatre-goers into a world of fantasy. |
The Columbia’s auditorium walls were decorated with images of a garden wall, enlivened with grilled windows and wrought-iron lanterns, above which appeared the cloud-streaked evening sky: the illusion was enhanced by painted or illuminated stars in the ceiling. The newspapers gushed about the Columbia’s smoke-and-mirrors qualities-the ‘effect that leads one to believe that he or she is seated in a garden’, the lighting arrangements that enhanced the effect of the ‘Moorish Renaissance’, the ‘Spanish effect’ of the light fixtures, and the ‘Moorish colour scheme’. Other theatres may have been built to a larger budget and were more ornately finished than the Columbia. Vancouver’s Orpheum, completed in the same year, was finished with more elaborate detail also in a Spanish/Moorish theme, but none else in the Lower Mainland could be called an atmospheric theatre.
The Columbia Theatre was developed by F.J. Coulthard with financial participation by Famous Players of Toronto. The architects were Townley and Matheson, a leading Vancouver firm whose other work included Vancouver City Hall, major buildings at Vancouver and Shaughnessy Hospitals, and several Vancouver schools. The theatre’s canopy announced that the theatre originally offered its patrons “Vaudeville + Photoplay”-a combination of cinema, vaudeville and live music. This was standard for the time; only later did theatres of this kind specialize in motion pictures. The first ‘talkie’ shown at the Columbia was a western, In Old Arizona, in 1929-30. In the years just after World War II, Columbia Street boomed as a regional shopping mecca. It soon became known as British Columbia’s ‘Miracle Mile’. Eaton’s built a large store next to the Columbia in 1949; many other retailers followed the department store’s lead, and the ambitious Front Street Parkade was built in 1959.
Columbia Street remained supreme until the 1970s, when large shopping centres in Surrey and Coquitlam cut deeply into its market. The major department stores left New Westminster at the end of that decade, and were replaced by discount and second-hand stores-symbolic of the consequences of suburban development for Columbia Street The Theatre slumped with its neighbourhood.
Famous Players “twinned” the Columbia in 1976, putting a second screen in place of the former balcony. The alterations removed the atmospheric qualities and many other architectural features. Even twinning did not make the theatre pay, and so it was closed in the mid-1980s. The Fraternal Order of Eagles bought the building in 1987, just as SkyTrain made Columbia Street once again more accessible to the region. The lower cinema became the Eagles’ Hall and the upper cinema (the former balcony) the lounge. The Raymond Burr Performing Arts Society
was formed with the purpose of restoring the Columbia to its original splendour,
and re-opened it as a performing arts centre. Its name honours a celebrated local son-Raymond Burr-born and buried in New Westminster. The Society sees the renaissance of the Columbia Theatre as essential to today’s economic revitalization of Columbia Street, just as the theatre’s builder, F.J. Coulthard, did seventy years ago. |
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