Today’s shot dates to the early 1940’s, and is looking south on Ouellette Ave. from just north of Wyandotte St.
From the Bernie Drouillard collection.
550
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Interesting in that you can see the Vanity Theatre sign. the last movie I saw there was in the late ’80s before it closed down. It was Rocky III.
Too bad we couldn’t salvage those street lights. The ones they are putting up today look ridiculous.
What message is the city trying to send? Futuristic? Wharf town? I don’t get it? Where is the vision?
What goes on at the old vanity these days?
It is now a bar and has been since about 1990.
In the 1940s when I went to movies there, my father used to remark on the bad sign for the Vanity. No letters should go in a direction opposite to the way we read. It didn’t stop me from getting off the St. Mary’s bus at Wyandotte and stop in to see a movie before I then took the Tecumseh Rd bus home to Chilver Rd. off Tecumseh. Other times I’d take the school bus all the way to the bus terminal and catch a movie at either the Capitol or the Palace. They changed double features twice a week, so I sometimes saw three movies a week before going home to dinner. My father was an executive with Hiram Walkers and dinner was promptly at 5:30 pm every day.
the corner of the big house you can see to the extreme right of the pic, was known as the ‘Dooley House’ I have never been able to find info on it, whether it once belonged to a city father, or mayor or business man. It’s huge, and seems to be a rooming house with ‘Joe’s Barber Shop’ in the basement.
Durung the late 40’s into the 50’s. the first floor of the house was Pat Ciccone’s accordion studio. His brother Frank also repaired instruments there. I don’t know what was upstairs.