From the Border Cites Star, June 23, 1921:
Designed by John Boyde and J.P. Thomson, the construction was supervised by Pennington and Boyde.
According to the newspaper reports at the time, this design was the winning one in a competition held to design the new building. Local architects who made it to the final round were I.S.F. Walker (who designed the Lincoln Road United Church), David Cameron and Albert McPhail. I would love to see some of the designs that were submitted but never chosen.
Throughout the 1920’s some of Windsor’s grandest buildings were schools. Along with John Campbell, Kennedy and others, it was truly a boom time in the Border Cities, luckily many of these fine buildings still stand today.
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"an auditorium to seat 8000 people"... is that a misprint?
JBM, probably a misprint. I went to Walkerville and I don't remember it being that big :)
I suspect 800 is more likely.
A capacity of 8,000 would have made it have a larger seating capacity than Radio City Music Hall by nearly 2,000 seats! Typical Windsor small-mindedness ;)
Consider for comparison the venue at Caesar's is 5,000 seats...
As a side note, I read through the article that accompanied the rendering, and it states 800 seats. So clearly a typo in the caption. :)
That is quite the landscaping depicted in the drawing. I have many postcards of Tech (aka Lowe) High School from it's early years but have never seen any of Walkerville. I'm sure they are out there. Does anyone out there have one?
Do you have any interior photographs of the Auditorium/Theatre? I haven't been in there since an elementary school field trip in the 80's. I remember it being quite nice inside there.
There are postcards of Walkerville collegiate, but the one I have doesn't say Walkerville you have to recognize the building. They just say collegiate institute...I think the one of Patterson also just says collegiate institute....
I attended Walkerville C.I. from 1954 to 1957, many unhappy memories, anyone remember the old principal a horrible man, Mr Balls or any of the useless teachers. They wouldn't get any where near a school today. Yes the auditorium did seat 800 and very nice it was. I was in the school orchestra (one good memory) and we often performed on the stage in front of the whole school. There were also many plays performed for both the school and the general public. The collegiate had a fine swimming pool and a new gymnasium was added about 1955.
Windsor Light Opera used to rehearse / perform at the auditorium about that time too. A crow could sing better than me, but I had friends in the Light Opera; I wonder if it still exists...