Timmins history: Movie theatres, part 2

We’re only days away from the first-ever Timmins Film Festival, so we’ve been looking at movie theatres in town through the ages.

The first in the Porcupine Mining Camp were the Majestic and the Rex in South Porcupine.

Now,  Timmins Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann moves into the town of Timmins, and the Mascioli family’s theatre empire.

“They started in 1916 with the new Empire Theatre on Third Ave., which is now the seniors centre.  They owned the Goldfields, which is the big building at the corner of Balsam and Third, and that was a huge movie house.  That could seat 800 people,” Bachmann recounts.  “People will remember the Palace Theatre.  I do as a kid, because we used to chuck stuff off the balcony.  The Palace was great, the Victory Theatre, the Cartier Theatre, which is at the bottom of the hill of Third Ave., which is now Osaka Sushi”.

In the 1940s, the Cartier held vaudeville shows starting at midnight… to accommodate shift workers.

“When television came in, like everywhere else, things changed,” Bachmann observes.  “Everybody thought it was going to change actually when radio came in because ‘Oh my gosh, we don’t really need to go see our news now at the theatre, we can actually catch it on radio.’”

All the big theatres eventually shut down, and now we have the single location with six screens.

Bachmann thinks it will survive, because of the big picture and big sound, and the communal activity of an evening at the movies.