Few Buildings From 1912 Still Do the Job They Were Built For
Few buildings that opened in 1912 are still doing the job they were built for. One that has stayed open through two world wars, the Great Depression, television, cable and streaming is 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, with the CPR track laid, ranching booming and land opening for settlement. A town like that needed somewhere to gather indoors, and the theatre became 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 had Tiffany-style fixtures, plush chairs and 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 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 original sandstone and brick buildings were worth keeping, and the Empress sits inside that district.
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 including Brokeback Mountain and Interstellar, and as Calgary circa 1915 in Passchendaele. Fort Macleod has not been remodelled into a theme park.
Still selling tickets
The Empress is run today by a not-for-profit society. It hosts concerts, film festivals, tribute bands, summer theatre camps.
The theatre has outlasted vaudeville, the silent era and the cable era, and the doors are still open.
The marquee on the main street still lights up after dark.
