Original architect: Thomas Lamb; restoration architect: Mandel Sprachman; restoration consultant: David Hannivan.
The architectural style of the building provided the important link between the nickelodeon, vaudeville and movie palace eras; the building exemplified the old and new of these changing times and contained features unprecedented in the traditional vaudeville theatres of Toronto.
Special features include: the exterior box office (currently off-site for restoration), a Corinthian columned lobby, the narrow main lobby façade and the lobby corridor to the auditorium, and the single balconies supported by enormous cantilever steel trusses
65,000 square feet of new space was added, including: cascading lobbies, an eight-storey backstage addition containing dressing rooms, loading docks, rehearsal studios and other facilities for contemporary theatre use. A crossover bridge creating access to escalators for the new lounges and washrooms on each level.
In the Elgin Theatre, opera boxes and plaster details were re-created where they had been damaged or removed over the years; details over the proscenium and balcony facia were sculpted, cast and replaced.
Wafer-thin aluminum leaf were used in the seven-step process of re-gilding the plaster details in the Elgin; “scagliola,” the process of marble veining, was used in the lobby and grand staircase, with over 10,000 square feet of surface being re-created or conserved.
Hundreds of pounds of bread dough was used to clean 20,000 square feet of hand-painted walls in the Winter Garden Theatre.
