Stained glass sign for the Kinemacolor Theatre was found
in ex-restaurant site
 |
| A circa-1913 stained glass window that was missing for decades is now in the possession of a dealer in architectural antiques |
By JOHN MACKIE
Vancouver Sun
A unique artifact
from the dawn of the movie age has surfaced at a Vancouver antique store — a stained glass
sign for the Kinemacolor Theatre.
Kinemacolor was a primitive colour film process that was all
the rage in Europe just before the First World
War.
Its North American
debut was at Madison Square Garden
in New York in 1909, and on Feb. 24, 1913, Canada 's
first Kinemacolor Theatre opened at 603 Granville, at Dunsmuir.
But it failed to
ignite Vancouver 's
masses, and by 1914, the theatre name had been changed to the Colonial. The
Colonial lasted until 1972, when it was torn down to make way for the Pacific
Centre Mall/Block 42 development downtown.
The kinemacolor
process died out by 1920, a victim of a patent lawsuit in England and the invention of
technicolor in 1917. Most kinemacolor films have been lost, and any kinemacolor
memorabilia is extremely rare.
The Kinemacolor
Theatre stained glass was recently purchased by Eric Cohen of Architectural Antiques.
It had been hanging
on the wall at the former Keg restaurant location at Thurlow and Alberni after mysteriously
vanishing from the Colonial in 1972.
Theatre legend Hugh
Pickett said the huge semi-circular stained glass sign (which is 13 feet wide
and seven feet high) was originally installed over the entrance to the old theatre.
"I can remember
it very well, because when the theatre was sold, they promised me four pieces
of stained glass," Pickett said.
"The night before
it was to be taken out, somebody went in there and took it."
Two oval stained
glass sky-lights featuring the kinemacolor torch logo also turned up at the old
Keg. Cohen purchased them as well, and is selling them for $15,000 for the pair.
He hasn't put a price tag on the Kinemacolor Theatre sign.
How they wound up at
the Keg is a mystery. Retired architect Bill Dunn helped design the Keg on Thurlow
in 1977. He said most of the furnishings, which included elaborate oak bookshelves
and oak wall panels, cam' from a 19th-century apothecary (drug-store) in Minneapolis and were purchased at auction in Los Angeles .
Dunn thinks the
stained glass came from the collection of then landlord John Adams, but has no idea
how Adams obtained it. He thinks the
restaurant furnishings may have cost about $100,000 in 1977.
The Keg moved to a bigger
location across the street last fall, but most of the furnishings were left
behind. A carpenter happened by when a demolition crew was ripping out the oak
walls and some stained glass, which was going to b: thrown out.
He asked if he could
have it, and contacted Cohen, who bought a couple of stained-glass windows and a
garage filled with century-old oak panels
Cohen then went down to the old Keg to poke around He spotted
the Kinemacolor Theatre sign, bought it, and assembled a crew of six to take it
down off the wall (he estimates it weighs 600 to 700 pounds.)
"It was stuck
right up o the top of the ceiling," he said. I walked to the top of a 17
foot ladder, and I was standing knocking a metal pin out to release the window."
The Kinemacolor sign
is one of the few remnants of Vancouver 's
silent movie era, when theatres had colourful name like the Cameraphone, the Bijou
and the Maple Leaf. A couple old theatres still remain from the era, like the
Pantages on Hastings street
and the Edison now the Paramount in New Westminster , but
finding an original sign is nothing short of miraculous.
In fact, English kinemacolor
expert Luke McKerna has never heard of a kinemacolor stained glass sign. He
thinks it may have been commissioned by the theatre owner, who probably
thought that having the only colour movies in town would be a gold mine.
Kinemacolor was invented
by English cinematographer George Albert Smith, and marketed by American entrepreneur
Charles Urban. Film was run through a projector at 32 frames per second, twice
the normal speed, and then filtered through red and green coloured lenses to produce
"the world's wonders in nature's colours."
Pickett has fond
memories of the theatre when it was called the Colonial. He got his first job there
in 1929.
"I'll tell you
something tragic," says Pickett, who turns 88 in a few weeks. "My
first job there, I had to go into a room in the basement of the building, which
had been condemned by the fire department because it was full of paper. All the
old three sheets [movie posters], one sheets, 24 sheets, stills, everything was
in that room. I had to take it out in barrels and take it out into the lane and
burn it.
"Can you
imagine what it would be worth today? A one sheet of Marlene Dietrich in a picture
that she made early on in her career sold for $300,000 at Parke Burnett [gallery]
in New York .
I had no interest in them then. Good God, now I've had had them all. It was the
whole history of the Colonial theatre. It took about three weeks to burn it all"
The Kinemacolor
Theatre sign isn't the only piece of historic stained glass Cohen has for sale.
When Mark James renovated the 1913 Lotus Hotel, he sold Architectural Antiques
several finely detailed pieces of stained glass. The old stained glass window from
the Lotus bar, for example, is now for sale for $5,500.
Cohen is now trying
to piece together the oak bookcase from the Minneapolis apothecary, which had been
disassembled. The centrepiece of the bookcase features carved griffins,
mythical beasts that look like lions.
Cohen might have 30
feet of bookcase by the time he's finished.
