Theatrical entrepreneur Marcus Loew liked to say that he sold tickets to theatres, not shows. The Winter Garden, perched atop the Elgin Theatre on Yonge Street, is the perfect example of his love of a good gimmick.

Built more than a century ago, it was a vaudeville theatre made to look like a lush garden, where beech leaves and wisteria hung from the ceiling, and gently fluttered in the breeze of a fan. The theatre was shuttered for decades when the “talkies” took over, but the magical atmosphere never changed.

Walking in through the lobby, “You’ve left the real world,” explains Ellen Flowers, a communications manager with the Ontario Heritage Trust, the provincial agency that rescued the building and restored both theatres in the 1980s. Since it reopened in 1989, the Winter Garden has played host to comedians, singers, film premieres and stage productions. Before “Caroline or Change” kicks off a two-week residency on Jan. 30, the Star went behind the scenes for a tour.

Marcus Loew’s name is synonymous with early Hollywood. Before he helped build Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the early 1920s, the “noted theatrical man” was trying to expand his reach across North America. His double-decker Toronto theatre was a big deal from an architectural sense, but it was also exciting because Loew had a variety of American vaudeville stars on contract, a fresh assortment of moving picture offerings and affordable tickets. In Toronto, he bought a chunk of real estate between Yonge and Victoria Streets and employed renowned architect Thomas Lamb to build his skyscraper of drama. It was an L-shaped building, with a “deceptively narrow” entrance on Yonge Street that led to the theatres built along Victoria Street. It was a cheaper way to get a Yonge Street address, and it became Toronto’s first and only “aerial theatre,” as the Globe said on opening day, “contrived by Marcus Loew’s genius.”

From Yonge Street, theatregoers walked into an opulent hallway of damask and gold leaf, where the names of great writers and composers were engraved, including Shakespeare, Schubert and “Lizt.” Nobody spell checked Franz Liszt’s name and “Lizt” remained during the 1980s renovations to preserve historic errors, Flowers says. Few people notice the mistake, especially during the Toronto International Film Festival, when stars walk through the gilded hall en route to screenings.

The ground floor Yonge Street theatre opened first, in December 1913. It was the bigger of the two and more of a workhorse, offering continuous entertainment from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. The prices topped out at 25 cents for the best seats in the afternoon. On any given day you could see a lineup that included jugglers, hypnotists, comedians, dancers, newsreels and movies. The theatre was renamed the Elgin in the 1970s.

The Winter Garden opened atop the Yonge Street Theatre just after Valentine’s Day 1914. The reporters thought it looked more of a summer garden, with ceilings hung with “gay wisteria,” lanterns and bubbling fountains. The fairy landscape that charmed the news men was a gimmick to charge a higher price, Flowers says. The Winter Garden had reserved seats that topped out at 50 cents a piece, and it offered the best from the Yonge Street Theatre each evening. Early on in the run, that happened to be a roaring farce, a comedy skit, a “sweet singer of sweet songs,” and a trio of rifle experts performing a spectacle of the bombardment of Tripoli.

The complex was built in a cantilevered style, which meant there were no columns at the front of the house obstructing views, like you’d find in earlier buildings like Massey Hall. It was a big deal and the newspapers commented on the clear views. The supporting columns in the main theatre were painted to resemble marble. When those same columns emerged upstairs in the Winter Garden, they became tree trunks, plastered with brown bark.

Wooden shelves were added to the tree trunks to hold oscillating fans. The theatre was air-conditioned, but these fans added atmosphere, sending a gentle rustle through the beech leaves and silk wisteria blooms, explains Flowers. The theatre was heralded for its beauty and safety and, long after it was abandoned, an engineer giving a tour in the 1950s plucked one of the leaves from the ceiling and held a lit match to it to demonstrate the fireproofing. (While Loew’s Yonge Street Theatre had a fire that caused extensive damage in 1928, the Winter Garden never had a fire.)

The opera boxes didn’t have the best sightlines, but they were built so regular Torontonians could see the important people. For opening night, Loew came from New York, and likely sat in the VIP seats to watch Polly Prim, the Moscrop Sisters and the Three Ernests: “The performers on the regular bill last night suffered a little from the lack of a rehearsal,” the Globe wrote.

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It wasn’t a glamorous life backstage. A dressing room was restored with items found during the renovations, including a curling iron, combs and business cards for a nearby rooming house on Bond Street that advertised a two-minute walk to the stage door, says Flowers, who timed the walk herself to confirm the claim. The window had a decent view on to Yonge Street in 1913, but now the view is hemmed in on all sides by towers.

Theatregoers could climb the grand staircase or ride one of the elevator cars. (“But if you incline to embonpoint,” one reporter wrote, using an arcane word to describe a pleasing plumpness, the elevator was likely easier work than the stairs.) The manual elevators were restored in the 1980s and are staffed by an operator during shows. The Ontario Heritage Trust also built an addition that allowed the theatres to have more modern conveniences, including a series of escalators.

Not long after the Winter Garden opened, there were troubling signs that vaudeville was losing the battle to the Hollywood films. The “talkies” especially were tough competition for the ventriloquist, the blind pianist and the joyful songologist. In 1928, the Winter Garden closed for good. While the ground floor theatre was wired for sound, and the likes of “Gone with the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz,” the secret garden upstairs was closed to the public and mostly forgotten, save for the occasional tour for a curious reporter. “It is dusty and chilly now,” a journalist wrote in 1957. “The seats are all gone and the stage is full of old candy vending machines and discarded equipment.” Occasionally, someone would express interest in reopening the theatre, but it was deemed too expensive and too impractical.

In 1981, the Ontario Heritage Trust purchased the complex. The Elgin, which had never closed, had been degrading steadily over the years. The Winter Garden was a time capsule, eerie and beautiful underneath decades of grime and dirt. A tabby cat prowled the many levels of the theatre, catching bats. MPP Reuben Baetz shone a flashlight into the darkness after the provincial agency acquired the building. The leaves fluttered and the stage seemed primed for magic. “I almost expected Al Jolson to step out at any minute,” he said in 1984.

Both theatres were declared National Historic Sites and restoration work began slowly. When the province announced funding and unveiled the grand staircase, which had been boarded up for years, a pair of original chorus girls named Elsie and Bessie did a small number on the old Winter Garden stage. Instead of the “slinky lingerie” they wore as 15-year-olds, the seventysomethings wore high-necked dresses.

The musical “Cats” took over the Elgin for two years in 1985 and, following that run, both theatres closed for extensive renovations. The marquee promised, “The Winter Garden will bloom again,” but inside, as the Globe and Mail noted, the leafy canopy was withered and crumbling: “Perpetual spring has become perpetual autumn.”

In the 1980s, volunteers gathered thousands of beech tree branches from woodlots north of the city. The trees had been felled through a government forest management project, and the branches were dipped in glycerine, spray-painted and fireproofed before they were weaved into the ceiling along with artificial wisteria and lanterns. In 2018, they updated the foliage, replacing the entire ceiling with 21,800 artificial branches of beech in shades of green, yellow and rusty autumn red.

There were many gems uncovered during the years of renovations, including a collection of hand-painted vaudeville scenery. These restored pieces now hang in the newly built lobby that adjoins both theatres.

Many of the original seats in the Winter Garden were built on wooden risers for added elegance and lift. One old newspaper story claimed that each seat had a candy dispenser on the back, like a Willy Wonka fever dream. The seats are long gone. According to the Globe, they were sold for $1 a piece around the 1960s. The current seats were repurposed from Chicago’s Biograph Theater, a contemporary of the Winter Garden.

The carpets are still grass green, and the walls and ceilings still painted with the original flora and woodland animals. After years of abandonment, they were grimy and rundown, but rendered in water-soluble paint. Cleaning the walls without ruining the imagery seemed impossible at first.

The solution was as strange as the theatre itself: hundreds of pounds of raw bread dough, rolled along the walls, did the trick, removing the dirt, but leaving the paint in place.

These days, the Winter Garden is still a working roadhouse. It’s an old vaudeville term, Flowers explains. They don’t produce their own shows but act as a rental venue for other companies. The Ontario Heritage Trust has volunteer-led tours every Monday at 5 p.m. and Saturday at 10 a.m. Flowers says that every time she’s given a tour, she corrals the group in the Winter Garden’s small lobby and asks who has been inside. If they’ve never been, she knows the first word they will say. It’s always, “Wow.” Even the faces of adults light up. “Some great idea over 100 years ago,” she says. “It still ignites wonder.”

“Caroline, or Change” is at the Winter Garden Theatre, 189 Yonge St., Jan. 30 to Feb. 15. See musicalstagecompany.com for information.