Most Buildings That Open in 1912 Do Not Make It to 2026
Most buildings that opened in 1912 are gone. The ones that survived two world wars, the Great Depression, the arrival of television, the cable era, and most of streaming are not common. The ones that survived all of that and are still selling tickets are rarer still.
The Empress Theatre on the main street of Fort Macleod opened in 1912. It is still selling tickets.
A vaudeville house for a frontier town
Fort Macleod in 1912 was a town doing well. The CPR had laid track. The ranching industry was booming. Land was opening for settlement. A frontier town in 1912 needed a theatre the way a modern city needs a coffee shop on every corner. The theatre was the community’s living room.
J.S. Lambert built it. The local press announced the project in January 1910 and called it the most unconventional opera house ever built in Fort Macleod. When the doors opened, the house seated four hundred. There were Tiffany-style fixtures, plush chairs, an orchestra pit. The exterior was kept plain to match the rest of Main Street. Every cent of the budget went inside.
Walls that remember
The basement dressing rooms still have the signatures of vaudeville performers carved into the wood-frame walls. Texas Tony and his Wonder Horse. The Purple Sage Riders, 1935. The CPR Minstrels, 1923. Performers wrote their names on the walls because they knew they would be back.
The North West Mounted Police were the first audience. The audience changed shape over the next century. The signatures stayed. The original interior balcony, seating, dressing rooms, and projection booth are all still in place.
A town that earned its preservation
In 1982, Fort Macleod became Alberta’s first Provincial Historic Area. The town’s stock of original sandstone and brick buildings, some dating to the 1870s, was worth keeping. Heritage Canada launched a parallel preservation project. The Empress was at the centre of it.
The town has earned its place in cultural memory in other ways. Joni Mitchell was born here in 1943. Hollywood has used the streetscape as a stand-in for frontier American towns in films like Brokeback Mountain, Interstellar, and Passchendaele. Fort Macleod has not been remodelled into a theme park. It just is what it is.
Still selling tickets
The Empress is run today by a not-for-profit society. It hosts concerts, film festivals, tribute bands, summer theatre camps. In 2025 the building turned 113 and the society launched a $450,000 restoration to replace seats and refresh the floor. The town and the province kicked in. So did private donors.
A theatre nobody on the eastern seaboard has ever heard of, in a town most Canadians cannot place on a map, has outlasted vaudeville, the silent era, the studio system, the cable era, and most of streaming.
The marquee on the main street still lights up after dark.
