Apparently issued sometime in 1922, this colourized postcard shows St. Catherine Street. A quick glance at the large sign in the foreground made me think it showed part of the marquee of the now demolished Seville Theatre at Chomedy and St. Catherine. The partially visible sign only shows a "ville." To my knowledge, no other theatre had "ville" in its name.
That couldn't be it. It just didn't look right, especially not with that large light-coloured building in the distance on the right. I knew that building. That is the Drummond Building at 1117 St. Catherine at the corner of Peel, opened in 1914 and still there today.
I took a much closer look at the postcard. We are looking west along St. Catherine from the corner of Mansfield sometime in the very early 1920s. The postcard says 1922.
On the very left side of the photo, just a sliver of an old sandstone Bank of Montreal branch is seen. Today I believe it is a Telus retail outlet (I moved from Montreal over 20 years ago so I only have Google Streetview with which to check). On the right hand side, or north side of St. Catherine between Mansfield and Metcalfe, all of those buildings would be demolished in a few years as the Simpson's Department Store building would be built in stages on that block from 1928 to 1930.
So what about the theatre marquee? I knew the old Loews Theatre had been beside the Bank of Montreal branch. Could it have ever been named something else? I looked through all the directories.They showed the Loews at 432 St. Catherine opening on Nov. 19, 1917. Civic addresses were reconfigured in the 1920s and Loews' new address became 952 St. Catherine. There was no other name.
Then in one directory entry I saw it: "Loews Vaudeville Theatre." There was the mysterious "ville." Loews of course, like many early theatres, was a vaudeville and film venue until becoming exclusively a movie theatre in 1940. It closed as a single screen house in 1975 and reopened as a multi-screen theatre in Dec. 1976 until finally closing in Oct. 1999. Today, the lobby is a Foot Locker store.
This second photo shows the exact same view as used in the Loews postcard. This time it shows the large "Loews" sign that was probably put up shortly after the theatre dropped vaudeville to become a movie house exclusively in 1940.
Both scenes were likely taken from the marquee of the Strand Theatre, which stood on the southeast corner of Mansfield and St. Catherine.
This black and white photo appears to have been taken in 1960 judging by the cars and the film showing at the Loews. "Bells are Ringing" starring Dean Martin has a 1960 release date. Traffic on St. Catherine would become one-way east with the opening of the Metro and the widened and renamed smaller streets that became De Maisonneuve running above the Metro.